I did something similar recently, trying to describe a piece of art that I couldn't remember the name of (it ended up being Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli) ... it really struggles with that sort of thing, but honestly so do most humans. It tended to recommend similarly to what you're describing with movies - it gets distracted by more popular/well-known pieces that don't really match up with the description you're giving to it.
Surprisingly, GPT did manage to identify a book that I remembered from college decades ago ("Laboratory Manual for Morphology and Syntax"). It seems to be out of print, and I assumed it was obscure.
