When this prompt came up, I smiled and knew I had to answer it, because rewatching movies and TV series is something I’ve done my whole life. I find returning to films and shows I love incredibly comforting, a bit like putting on a favourite worn sweater.

Rewatching also lets me notice the tiny details I missed the first few times. I feel like I always learn something new from them, or interpret them in slightly different ways each time I come back.

When I go to bed, I always watch something on my MacBook to fall asleep. It helps my anxiety and also helps as the side effects of Quetiapine start to kick in. If I watch something I’ve seen before, I fall asleep much more easily. If it’s something new, my brain works too hard trying to stay awake to see what happens next.

Given that I’ve rewatched almost everything I love far more than five times, here are the top 5 of my absolute favourite rewatches – a few scenes from these I’ve even drawn in graphite pencil.

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1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is without a doubt my favourite movie of all time – and not just because Kate Winslet is in it and I LOVE her. I first watched it late one night on Channel 4 when I was younger and couldn’t sleep. I had never seen Jim Carrey in anything other than comedy, so I was completely bowled over by his performance. It was so different from anything I expected, and I sank into the film, completely transfixed.

Since my best friend died, this movie has begun to hit me in a completely different way. Before that, I always saw it as a kind of hopeful story. There are parts of my past I wish I could delete, and honestly I can’t think of many downsides to that. They didn’t strengthen me or add to my story in some meaningful way. I am who I am in spite of those things – the past that made me weaker, afraid, struggling with mental illness, and often very alone because of it.

Grief is incredibly painful, but I would never erase knowing my best friend just to remove the grief I feel every day. Those memories have become more precious to me as my grief has changed. In the beginning, even the happy memories made the pain worse, but over time they’ve become something I hold onto instead.

I really am who I am because I met her. Without those memories of her – without her – I think I would feel far more empty.

I drew the scene above after my best friend died, to commemorate these new feelings I had about this movie. I just wish I could meet her in Montauk.

I think another reason this film resonates with me so much is that I recognise parts of myself in both Clementine and Joel. Clementine’s emotional, impulsive chaos feels very familiar, but so does Joel’s quiet, reflective side. I’ve never really seen my type of personality represented on screen before but Eternal Sunshine shows both parts of me.

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2. Interstellar

Interstellar is an absolutely beautiful movie. I love physics and space, but the film is also about love – how love survives everything, even dystopian, dust-filled futures that require us to leave Earth behind. The part that always hits me the hardest is Cooper’s relationship with Murph.

Throughout my life I’ve survived many things, and sometimes I don’t really know how. Whenever I wonder why, the answer that always comes to mind is my son. I survived so that he could become who he is. So that I could support him and watch him grow into himself.

I also feel strangely connected to him across time – past, present, and future all at once. Even now, when he’s 21, I still see his little child face in his grown-up one all the time. Interstellar somehow visualises that feeling for me: the way love stretches across time, and the lengths you would go to for your child – to save them, or simply to allow them to become who they are meant to be.

The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer is also incredible, and I listen to it constantly. In fact, I’m listening to it while writing this.

I drew Dr Brand in graphite pencil. I’ve actually drawn this image many times – partly to sit in the feelings the film gives me for a while, and partly to improve my art.

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3. Moon

Another space movie.

I actually found Moon because of Mass Effect. I played Mass Effect and fell in love with the soundtrack, so I looked up who composed it and discovered Clint Mansell. After that I went on a bit of a mission to watch every film he’d written a soundtrack for. Out of all of them, Moon was my favourite.

It feels to me like Clint Mansell, despite never being in space, somehow knows exactly how space sounds and feels.

I also loved The Fountain, but Moon is the one I keep coming back to. It feels like a warning about dystopian futures shaped by corporations – something that reminds me a lot of Cyberpunk 2077.

I recently watched it with my son for the first time – his first time seeing it. He loved it so much that he used it as an example in a piece of writing. His interpretation was that Sam was running away from his emotions, and that this was what led him to be there in the first place.

I really loved getting to share something I love with him and seeing him connect with it too – especially the music. Loving Clint Mansell is clearly a requirement in this house.

I haven’t drawn anything from Moon yet, but maybe I should get on that.

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4. Homeland

I love Homeland so much. The acting across the entire show is fantastic – it’s incredibly believable. I’m especially fond of Clare Danes and Costa Ronin, who play Carrie and Yevgeny. Carrie’s portrayal resonates with me in a very personal way because I also have Bipolar disorder. Her experience feels very close to mine, although I probably experience more depression overall.

In one of the later seasons Carrie takes the same medication that I take, and there’s a moment where she becomes slow and slurred from it. I remember watching that after having a morning where I felt exactly like that, and feeling very seen.

I often watch Homeland when I’m not doing well. One thing the show captures so well is that Carrie can still be brilliant, relentless, and passionate despite her diagnosis – but only within certain limits. That part gives me a lot of hope. It reminds me that people like me can still exist in the world and contribute meaningful things.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the version of Carrie who chose to put everything I had into raising my son instead. Carrie chooses her work, believing that what she does benefits more people – including her daughter. In my own life I’ve often had to make similar choices about where my energy goes.

It can feel like you’re given fewer plates to spin before everything starts crashing down. When I try to pour myself into too many things at once, all of them suffer. I experienced that when I was at university while also working. I couldn’t cope with both. One of them had to go, and I needed money for rent, so I left university. Mentally, I was struggling the entire time.

You see that clearly in Homeland too. Carrie often pushes herself to juggle too many things at once, and it eventually leads to an episode. I think that’s something people who haven’t experienced it sometimes take for granted – they assume everyone has the same capacity.

People ask why Carrie can’t be both a good mother and a CIA agent at the same time.

The answer is simple: she doesn’t have the capacity for both.

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5. Arrival

Yet another space movie.

This one excited me because of my complete fascination with time. Time itself was what originally got me interested in physics. In the film, an alien language allows the protagonist, Louise, to experience time differently. That idea immediately made me wonder: if aliens do exist, could their experience of time be completely different to ours?

It’s such a fascinating concept to me – that their entire physics might even be different.

But the movie is also about love again, and about whether you would still make the same decisions if you could see the future and the outcome of those decisions while living in the present. I sometimes wonder whether that ability would help my decision paralysis, or make it far worse.

I also love Arrival because the aliens are not presented as antagonists. When I imagine alien life, I’ve always imagined something closer to this – something entirely different from us, rather than simply a hostile mirror of humanity. Humans often project our own nature onto aliens we don’t even know exist.

That idea was actually joked about many times in Mass Effect – that humans struggle to see or accept anything truly different from themselves. It probably explains a lot about the divisions we already have here on Earth.

Aliens would not be human. They might be something completely unimaginable.

But Arrival felt much closer to how I’ve always imagined them.

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For the Love of Space

It seems I really love stories about love – as long as they’re set in space, have brilliant music, and don’t star Jennifer Aniston.

This list has also made me realise that I need to draw scenes from Arrival and Moon. I’m actually a bit baffled that I haven’t already, but I suppose most of my drawing time has been spent working on scenes from my favourite games instead.

Let me know if any of these films resonated with you too. I love chatting about my favourite movies and TV shows.

Honestly, this list could have been much longer. I have so many films and series that I’ve watched more than five times, and for the ones above I’ve completely lost count of how many times I’ve actually rewatched them.

Here’s what I was listening to writing this, enjoy.