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[Nickie Koskinen]

What is it about Mamma Mia that has an almost irresistible amount of charm? Maybe it's the blue waters of Kalokairi, Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, or Donna & The Dynamos epic performances! Whatever it may be, I am always on the hunt for a movie with a similar feel. Believe me, if I could bottle that energy up and sell it, I would be able to live on Kalokairi in real life!

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is like Mamma Mia! but without the musical aspect. It's a coming-of-age film that follows the struggles of four teen girls during a pivotal summer in their lives. Bonus points: one of the storylines involves a summer romance in Greece!

If you loved the first Mamma Mia, you'll love the second one! Lily James plays a young Donna and details what really happened the summer Sophie was conceived. Plenty of summer fun and musicality to get you through if you're missing the beach.

Grease is a classic high school musical about a girl named Sandy who is the new girl in school and runs into her summer romance Danny. If you've never seen Grease, it's set in the 50s and has some great tunes to sing along to.

If you found Amanda Seyfried as Sophie from Mamma Mia to be mega-charming, you'll love this summer romance film she stars in called Letters to Juliet. In the movie, Seyfried's character travels to Verona Italy and volunteers to help answer love letters addressed to Juliet. When she finds an old letter, she is determined to reunite the lost lovers, and it changes her life in more ways than one.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 expands upon the stories of the four friends that have decided to share a magical pair of pants over the summers they spend apart. Each girl experiences a different struggle during their summer and yes, there are still many magical scenes in Greece!

Hairspray is musical set in the 1960s about a teenager named Tracy who wants to join the cast of "The Corny Collins Show" to dance for a chance to become Miss Hairspray! My bet is that most people who like Mamma Mia will have a lot of fun watching this film.

Aquamarine is seriously one of the most underrated teeny-bop girly movies of all time! A story about friendship and love, it's no secret Aquamarine is one of my favorites. Plus, it's got that beachy vibe that automatically lifts your spirits.

Okay, I know this one is kind of a curve ball. But I don't think I've ever met someone who doesn't love this movie. It has Lily James starring as Cinderella (she plays young Donna in Mamma Mia 2) and there are some beautiful musical moments. Plus, the iconic blue dress from the film is straight out of a fantasy book - almost a blue as deep as the ocean!

Do you have a go-to comfort movie to watch??? Mamma Mia always makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside along with all of the charming, summery movies on this list. Let me know if there are any other movies that give you that Mamma Mia vibe!

Netflix's original science fiction film Atlas is one of the platform's most recent action adventures, but is far from the only film to tackle its subject matter. Taking place in the far future, Atlas stars Jennifer Lopez as the eponymous Atlas Sepherd, a data analyst with a deep mistrust of A.I. who is nevertheless forced to overcome her biases by working with a sentient program to save the world. Despite its fascinating premise, the film failed to impress critics, resulting in one of Jennifer Lopez's worst Rotten Tomatoes scores yet.

Luckily, Atlas is far from the only action fueled sci-fi saga to explore artificial intelligence, trust of non-human entities, and slick mech suit battles. Some of these stories are more similar in tone and surface-level visuals, whereas others can share the film's testimony of a human-A.I. bond. Even if Atlas isn't one of Jennifer Lopez's best movies, it clearly draws inspiration from some noteworthy places worth revisiting in the film's wake.

Atlas' exploration of the possible bond between a human and an A.I. is nothing new. The film's own relationship between mech pilot Atlas and her suit's onboard computer, Smith, is vaguely reminiscent of the hit video game Titanfall 2. What's rarer is a story that's willing to take the bond between machine and flesh even further, presenting a human/A.I. relationship that becomes deeper than mere camaraderie.

Enter 2019's I Am Mother, a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that explores a broken planet in need of re-population. The film's duo, a young girl simply referred to as "Daughter", and her robot caretaker, Mother, have to navigate a ravaged world populated mostly by robots. Even if Atlas' twist ending is far different from that of I Am Mother, both films are fascinating explorations of human and A.I. relationships in the wake of disastrous events caused by the latter.

A fellow Netflix original, Next Gen follows a similar premise and trajectory to Atlas through the lens of a family-friendly animated picture. The film stars a lonely girl named Mai who lives in a futuristic world in which over-reliance on robots has become the norm, fostering an immense hatred for the artificial beings everyone else seems to love. Her world is turned upside-down when she forms an unexpected bond with an escaped top-secret military robot, called 7723.

Next Gen follows a very similar arc to Atlas, with a female protagonist weary of artificial intelligence that is slowly won over by a helpful robotic companion. Even if it is family-friendly, Next Gen has a certain callousness to it that oozes out of Mai's caustic coping mechanisms and liberal robot-on-robot violence, making it closer in tone to Atlas' PG-13 rating than one might expect. With genuinely impressive 3-D animation and a similarly enjoyable unlikely duo, Next Gen is a great dessert to reach for upon finishing Atlas.

Like many movies similar to Atlas,Upgrade puts a human protagonist opposite a friendly, if off-putting A.I. Where Upgrade raises the stakes is in the invasive nature of the program's level of control, exerting its will on not just a mechanized suit, but the very human body itself. Blurring the line between user and technology like never before, Upgrade takes Atlas' premise in a far more brutal and extreme direction.

Logan-Marshall Green stars as Grey Trace, a technophobic auto mechanic who swears revenge after his wife is murdered by mysterious interests. Implanted with an A.I. chip called STEM, capable of enhancing his movements, Grey goes on a revenge-fueled rampage, made all the more stylish by the film's daring cinematography and brutal fight choreography. With a similar premise but a far darker tone and ending compared to Atlas,Upgrade deserves to be in the running for scariest movies about artificial intelligence run amok.

If the idea of a man-and-machine team-up action movie has become popular enough to be a sci-fi subgenre in its own right, I, Robot could be argued to be the first major release to perfect the formula. Loosely based on the Isaac Asimov's short story of the same name, I, Robot has Will Smith's Del Spooner, a homicide detective with a personal distaste for robots, investigating the mysterious suicide of a genius titan of the industry. Along the way, he reluctantly accepts the help of Sonny, a particularly gifted android.

Spooner and Sonny have a fantastic buddy-cop dynamic that matures naturally over the course of the movie, with Spooner's venomous distrust gradually easing into a measure of respect for his newfound robotic companion. The action scenes and world building I, Robot's futuristic world have also held up surprisingly well 20 years later, making the film well worth a re-visit. Clearly inspiring at least some sliver of Atlas and Smith's dynamic, Spooner and Sonny were the first to represent man and machine in a big-budget action movie.

Not every movie bearing a passing resemblance to Atlas necessarily focuses on artifical intelligence, specifically. Some human and nonhuman relationships explore similar ideas of prejudice and interspecies wariness without the meta-commentary of technological advancement, and do so just as well. Neill Blomkamp's directorial debut, District 9 explores a world much like our own in which a population of insectoid alien refugees appeared on Earth in the early eighties, forever changing political discourse.

Admittedly, District 9 is a rather on-the-nose metaphor for apartheid in South Africa, even taking place in the same nation. Still, the film's message is worth exploring even if it is done so somewhat clumsily, supplemented by some incredible CGI that looks better than a lot of contemporary sci-fi movies. Like Atlas, District 9 explores the limits of human bonds between nonhuman entities punctuated with some explosive mech suit action. It's a shame the sequel, District 10, has languished in development limbo for so long.

Long before it was a sprawling epic streaming saga on Max, Westworld was one of the earliest films to thoughtfully explore the implications of artificial intelligence. Based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, Westworld introduces the viewer to a cowboy-themed amusement park populated by robotic human fakes, a paradise of hedonism in which guests could act out every fantasy on the park's nonhuman denizens free of repercussions. It's not until the robots begin fighting back that the drama, and horror, truly begins.

Unlike Atlas, Westworld has no cutesy robot sidekick to balance out the nightmarish artificial horrors. Like Simu Liu's Harlan, the rebellious androids of Westworld have no pity for their creators, chasing protagonist Peter on a lengthy series of close-calls with his android assailants. Westworld offers some thoughtful commentary on human nature and the development of technology that may be worth engaging with for those coming out of Atlas with a thirst for something headier.

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