Movies Women Love (And Men Roll Their Eyes At)
The man on the couch sighing heavily while his wife puts on Beaches for the fourteenth time is enduring something other than the film: the knowledge that he’ll be emotionally compromised within the hour and can’t stop it. These films have a power that action movies and thrillers don’t: they go directly after the things that matter: friendship, self-worth, love that lasts, and what it means to be seen.
Men roll their eyes at this subject matter because it hits closer to home than they want to admit.
I’m on the women’s side of this couch. The eye-rolling has always looked to me like self-defense passing itself off as taste, and it’s a lazy habit. I’d take a well-built weepie over a forgettable explosion movie any night of the week. These films go after what people lie awake worrying about, and hitting that target cleanly is a lot harder than blowing up a building.
The twenty films here represent the best of a genre people have condescended to since it began. They’re not all great cinema by conventional metrics. Several of them are silly.
But they do what they set out to do with real craft, and what they set out to do, make you feel something real about the things that matter most, is harder than it looks. The eye-rolling is a defense mechanism. These films work, and everyone in the room knows it.
Writers looking to craft their own moving stories will find essential techniques in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Romance Writer’s Handbook.
1. Dirty Dancing (1987)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”
The man’s version of this film: a boring story about a girl who learns to dance. The actual film: a coming-of-age story about a young woman discovering that her father’s vision of her is a cage, that competence is attractive, that class is a real and cruel system, and that becoming yourself requires leaving behind the version of you that made other people comfortable. Also, Patrick Swayze.
The dancing is extraordinary, Swayze and Jennifer Gray trained for months, and the final lift, earned across ninety minutes of work, is one of cinema’s most satisfying payoffs.
The film’s secret weapon is what it does with Baby’s father. He’s not a villain. He’s a loving man whose love centers on a version of his daughter that’s no longer accurate, and his path from disapproval to the famous final moment (“I’ve always been proud of you, Baby”) is the film’s actual emotional spine. The romance is the surface. The father-daughter arc is the heart. Men who claim to be bored by this film have somehow missed the plot they should care about.
I like the father storyline most here, and that final line to Baby moves me more than any lift. I’d rate the film higher if the dialogue didn’t go soggy whenever Johnny starts explaining his feelings out loud. The movie is far better when people say what they mean with their feet.
2. Pretty Woman (1990)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“You and I are such similar creatures, Vivian. We both screw people for money.”
The premise is, examined directly, a fairy tale about a billionaire falling for a prostitute, and every critic who has ever pointed this out is correct. The film knows this, and that’s why it works: Garry Marshall commits to the fantasy so completely that resistance becomes futile. Roberts and Gere have chemistry that can’t be manufactured. She’s electric, he’s charmed, and the camera treats both of them as the best-looking people in every room they enter, a form of wish fulfillment so unabashed it becomes its own kind of honesty.
What men miss while eye-rolling: the film is about Vivian refusing to be ashamed of herself. Every scene where someone treats her with contempt (the hotel staff, the boutique saleswomen, Edward’s lawyer) is a scene about dignity under pressure, and Roberts plays each one with a hurt that doesn’t collapse into surrender. The shopping revenge sequence is satisfying because she refuses to accept someone else’s judgment of her worth. The fairy tale is the delivery mechanism. Self-respect is the actual subject.
Roberts is so good at playing hurt without folding that I forgive this film a great deal. What I can’t quite forgive is how neatly it waves away what Vivian’s life on the street would’ve cost her. I enjoy the fantasy, but I notice the cheat every time Edward’s money fixes something money wouldn’t fix.
3. Steel Magnolias (1989)
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”
Six women in a Louisiana beauty salon over two years. That’s the entire film, and that’s enough, because Robert Harling’s script (adapted from his own play about his sister’s death) understands that the way women talk to each other (with humor deployed as armor, with cruelty deployed as affection, with the tone of people who have known each other so long they can say anything) is among the most complex and least documented forms of human communication in cinema.
The cast (Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts) is the most stacked ensemble in any film on this list, and Herbert Ross directs them with enough restraint to let them work. The grieving scene in the cemetery, where Field cycles from grief to rage to laughter in three minutes of unbroken performance, is one of American cinema’s great acting moments. Men who claim they don’t cry at this film are either lying or haven’t reached that scene yet.
Steel Magnolias is the film on this list I’d push hardest on any man who thinks the genre is soft. The cemetery scene has women using jokes to hold each other up while the floor drops out, and Harling wrote them so well that every laugh costs something. Anyone who dismisses it as a hair salon movie wasn’t paying attention.
4. Beaches (1988)
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
“But enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do YOU think of me?”
The definitive female friendship film, and the one men are most thoroughly baffled by. The friendship between CC Bloom and Hillary Whitney, which begins with CC announcing herself as the center of the universe and Hillary deciding to find this charming, not insufferable, covers thirty years, multiple betrayals, romantic complications, career reversals, and finally a terminal illness. The film argues that this friendship is the most important relationship in both women’s lives. Not the men. The friendship.
Bette Midler’s CC is the film’s engine (loud, needy, talented, occasionally monstrous, incapable of being anything other than completely herself) and the film is honest that loving someone this exhausting is a choice that requires renewal. What keeps Hillary choosing it, every time, is the film’s actual question. The answer belongs to this friendship and these two women, and the film works because of it. It’s not about female friendship in general. It’s about this friendship, in all its particular difficulty and particular irreplaceability.
Ready to write stories that make readers feel everything? The Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Romance Writer’s Handbook reveals the techniques behind fiction’s most moving moments.
5. The Notebook (2004)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
“So it’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna be really hard. We’re gonna have to work at this every day.”
Men have mocked The Notebook so thoroughly that it’s become shorthand for manipulative sentiment, the cinematic equivalent of onion-cutting. The mockery misses the film’s structural intelligence: Nick Cassavetes frames the entire love story retrospectively, told by an old man to his wife who has dementia and no longer knows him, in the hope that the story will bring her back. That present-tense grief shadows every scene of young passion. You’re watching the beginning of something you already know becomes this.
Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams generate chemistry that the film is honest enough not to over-romanticize: they fight, they’re selfish, they’re wrong about each other in specific ways before they’re right. The film’s central argument (that love is maintained through daily recommitment, not sustained by initial feeling) isn’t the lazy sentiment its reputation implies. The rain kiss is the image everyone remembers. The old man reading to his wife every day is what the film is about.
I’m split on The Notebook. The old man reading to his wife is the best idea in it, and those scenes move me every time the film returns to them. The young romance runs long and is far too pleased with its own rainstorm. I wish the film trusted the old man’s chapters more and the rain kiss less.
6. Thelma & Louise (1991)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
“You said you and me was gonna get out of town and for once just really let our hair down. Well darlin’, look out, ’cause my hair is comin’ down.”
Ridley Scott’s road movie is the entry on this list that men are least likely to roll their eyes at and the one most likely to devastate them, because it’s formally a Western (two outlaws on the run, a landscape of impossible beauty, an ending that refuses compromise) and men understand Westerns. What they sometimes resist is the acknowledgment that the film makes its argument (that women making their way through a world organized against them face choices that would break most men) through a genre men claim as their own.
Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are both exceptional, but the film belongs to Davis: Thelma’s transformation from a woman who apologizes for existing into someone who has discovered her own capacity for action is one of American cinema’s great character arcs. The ending is a refusal, the choice to fly, not be caught, and Scott shoots it as triumph. Men who find the ending bleak are reading it wrong.
I’d put that ending up against any Western finale ever shot. Davis lets Thelma grow a spine one scene at a time, so by the end I believe she’d choose to fly, and it plays as a win. My only gripe is that the pursuit scenes keep pulling me out of the car when I’d rather stay in it with those two women.
7. Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
“Face it girls, I’m older and I have more insurance.”
Two stories across two time periods, connected by Kathy Bates visiting an elderly woman in a nursing home who tells her about a Depression-era friendship in Alabama. The men in both stories range from irrelevant to murderous.
That’s part of the point: both narratives are about women finding power and purpose through each other. The film has a gentle radicalism about it (the domestic arrangement at the Whistle Stop Cafe isn’t coded) that it wears without announcement.
Kathy Bates’s Evelyn Couch is the film’s most underrated element: a middle-aged woman who’s invisible to everyone around her, including her husband, who discovers through Ninny’s stories that she’s permission to take up space. Her transformation, from apologetic mousy housewife to someone who rams the car of a parking-space thief twice and laughs about it, is earned through every visit to the nursing home. Ninny doesn’t tell her what to do. She just shows her what women have always been capable of.
8. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
“Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”
Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly is one of cinema’s greatest villains, and she’s a villain in the way that powerful women are judged as villains: she’s exacting, she’s unsentimental, she doesn’t apologize for her standards, and she’s organized her life around her work and doesn’t bend it for other people’s comfort. A male character with identical behavior would be called driven. The film knows this and uses it: Miranda’s final monologue, explaining to Andy that she recognized herself in her, is the sharpest thing in the script.
What men miss: this is a film about the cost of ambition and the double bind that faces women who pursue it. Andy can either be good at the job and lose herself, or keep herself and lose the job. Miranda chose the job so thoroughly that she’s lost everything else, and she’s not presented as entirely wrong about the choice. She’s presented as someone who made it with clear eyes and lives with it with clear eyes. That’s not the simple villain arc the eye-rolling implies.
Miranda is the reason this film ranks where it does. Streep never begs for sympathy and never goes cheap, and I’d take one of her quiet put-downs over a page of shouting from a lesser villain. It bugs me that people still call her a monster. She’s the most competent person in the building and expects everyone else to keep up, and I’ve got a lot of sympathy for a boss like that.
9. Legally Blonde (2001)
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⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
“What, like it’s hard?”
The film sets up its central joke (blonde sorority girl gets into Harvard Law) to be the audience’s joke too, and then spends ninety minutes dismantling it. Elle Woods is someone whose real intelligence people have dismissed because it’s housed in a pink wardrobe and expressed through enthusiasm. The film’s argument (that competence doesn’t require the performance of seriousness) is more subversive than it looks from the poster.
Reese Witherspoon commits entirely to Elle’s sincerity, the performance’s key choice: Elle is never self-aware about her presentation in the way a satirical character would be. She’s who she is, serious about the work, and unbothered by others’ dismissal of her. That combination (warmth without irony, competence without apology) is why the character has lasted. The film is, at bottom, about the difference between being taken seriously and deserving to be taken seriously. Elle shows the distinction exactly.
10. Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
“I like you, very much. Just as you are.”
Helen Fielding’s Pride and Prejudice update works because Renée Zellweger plays Bridget not as a loveable klutz but as a specific, intelligent woman who’s her own harshest critic. The diary format establishes her internal monologue as the film’s organizing voice (we’re inside her self-assessment, which is relentlessly unflattering) and this produces the film’s central irony: the audience can see clearly that Bridget is more capable and more appealing than she believes, while she can’t see it at all.
The Darcy parallel is precise enough to be satisfying and loose enough not to be mechanical, and Colin Firth, who played Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice six years earlier, is doing something specific in the casting joke: he’s playing a man who’s also, at heart, the kind of person Bridget is. Both are prickly, self-conscious, better than their social performance suggests, and unable to communicate what they mean. The film’s warmth comes from watching two people who are wrong about themselves find each other.
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11. Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
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⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
“It was like coming home, only to no home I’d ever known.”
Nora Ephron’s film is formally unusual in a way that men generally don’t notice and women intuitively understand: Sam and Annie share almost no screen time until the final scene.
The entire film is about two people becoming ready for each other, Sam recovering from grief, Annie recognizing that her sensible engagement lacks the feeling she heard in a stranger’s voice on the radio. The romance is the destination. The preparation is the film.
The film’s open debt to An Affair to Remember (characters watch it, quote it, cry at it while men around them stare in bewilderment) is Ephron making an argument: the kind of romantic feeling the old films depicted is still available, still real, and the modern world’s irony about it is a defense mechanism instead of a sophistication. Sam and Annie deserve their eventual meeting at the top of the Empire State Building by each doing the internal work that makes the meeting mean something.
12. Mamma Mia! (2008)
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
“I am nothing special, of this I am sure.”
Nobody is pretending this is great cinema. The singing is variable. Pierce Brosnan’s vocal performance has been described, charitably, as enthusiastic. The plot exists primarily to get characters from one ABBA song to the next, and the Greek island setting is an excuse to put everyone in white linen and sunshine. None of this matters. Mamma Mia! works on pure joy frequency, and joy deployed with this level of commitment is its own form of craft.
Meryl Streep (who also appears in The Devil Wears Prada on this list, because she’s apparently required by law to be in at least two films every woman loves) throws herself into the dancing and singing with zero self-protection, and her abandon is infectious. The film’s actual subject, beneath the ABBA catalog, is a woman who built a full life on her own terms and is now watching her daughter prepare to launch her own.
That Donna is entirely at peace with this, and celebrates it with dancing, is the radical thing the eye-rollers don’t notice.
I can’t defend Mamma Mia! on a single technical point and I don’t care. Brosnan’s singing is rough as hell, and the film is still more fun than most of the self-important dramas I’ve sat through. A movie that sets out to make people happy and pulls it off deserves more respect than it gets.
13. Clueless (1995)
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⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
“I was just totally clueless.”
Amy Heckerling’s Emma transposition is one of the smartest screenplays of the 1990s, a film that at once celebrates and satirizes Beverly Hills teenage culture while remaining warm toward its protagonist. The film understands Cher Horowitz as someone whose considerable intelligence is deployed on relatively small problems because nobody has yet given her larger ones, and who will be formidable when they do.
Alicia Silverstone plays Cher’s narcissism and her real kindness at the same time, the performance’s central insight: Cher is self-absorbed and she’s generous. Both are real. The film’s arc (Cher discovering that she’s been meddling in others’ lives to avoid examining her own) is Austen’s arc delivered through a 1990s California lens without losing any of the original’s intelligence. This is one of the better adaptations in American film history, and it’s dressed in plaid and feather boas throughout.
This is the smartest film on this page, and it’s the one I’d rewatch first. Heckerling took Austen seriously enough to steal her bones and leave the bonnets behind, and Silverstone makes Cher so likable that I forgive her meddling before the film even asks me to. My one small complaint is that some of the slang has aged, and that’s about as serious as my objections get.
14. Mean Girls (2004)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“On Wednesdays we wear pink.”
Tina Fey adapted Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, a nonfiction examination of female social hierarchies in high school, into a comedy that’s also a fairly rigorous sociological study. The Plastics are mean in specific, documented ways that any woman who attended high school will recognize immediately and any man will find confusing. The specificity is the point: this isn’t a cartoon of female cruelty but an accurate diagram of it.
Lindsay Lohan’s Cady Heron is the film’s moral center and its most interesting character because she’s not immune to the system she’s studying: she joins the Plastics as an anthropological observer and becomes one. Fey’s screenplay is honest about how easily the adoption of a social performance can become indistinguishable from real identity. Cady stops pretending to be mean and simply is mean, without noticing the transition. The film’s resolution requires her to recognize this, and that’s more psychologically sophisticated than most comedies about high school manage.
15. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
“Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed.”
Richard Curtis’s film is the most formally elegant on this list: five social occasions as chapters, each one advancing the relationship between Charles and Carrie while tracking the ensemble’s romantic complications, all organized around the single devastating central chapter that gives the film its emotional weight. The funeral, and the W.H. Auden poem Matthew reads for Gareth, resets everything. It’s the moment the film stops being charming and becomes something felt, and the charm that follows it is richer because something real interrupted it.
Hugh Grant’s Charles is a man who has organized his life around avoiding commitment and has developed elaborate social charm as the avoidance mechanism. Andie MacDowell’s Carrie sees through it immediately, so he’s attracted to her and terrified of her at once. Their relationship is the film’s comedy and its seriousness in equal measure: two people who are right for each other and are each too defended to admit it without first exhausting every alternative.
Master the pacing that keeps readers turning pages in the Pacing Handbook.
16. 9 to 5 (1980)
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
“I’m no fool. I’ve killed the boss, you think they’re not gonna fire me for a thing like that?”
Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton (three women who couldn’t be more different in temperament, background, and comedy style) discover that what they share is a boss (Dabney Coleman, doing career-best work as a man who embodies every workplace sin) who treats them all with contempt. Their revenge fantasy sequences (each woman imagining a different, genre-suitable way to dispatch him) are among the funniest things in 1980s American comedy.
It’s funnier and angrier than its cheerful reputation suggests. It catalogs workplace abuses (the boss who takes credit for a woman’s work, the boss who makes advances and then claims the woman pursued him, the condescension, the pay disparity) with the precision of someone who had experienced all of them. Colin Higgins developed his screenplay with input from real working women, and it shows. It’s a fantasy about ordinary women who have had enough, and that’s considerably more satisfying.
This one is funny and maddening in the same scene, and few comedies pull that off. Coleman plays the kind of boss a lot of working people have met at least once, and I enjoy seeing three women take him apart. Parton is funnier and sharper here than the film’s cheerful reputation gives her credit for.
17. Grease (1978)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
“Tell me about it, stud.”
Grease is the film men are most likely to enjoy while pretending to roll their eyes at it, because it’s good songs, good dancing, and enough real comedy to carry the weaker moments. It’s also the film on this list with the most problematic ending, which its devotees have spent forty-five years either defending, reinterpreting, or simply deciding not to examine too closely. Sandy changes herself entirely to win Danny. Danny makes a token gesture toward changing himself. The film presents this as triumphant.
The reason it survives this problem is the performances: Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy is warm and specific enough that her transformation reads as liberation. She’s not becoming someone else, she’s deciding to want what she already wanted and stop apologizing for it. John Travolta’s Danny is charming. The songs are extraordinary. Grease is a film you can love while being honest about its flaws, a relationship model more people should consider for everything in their lives.
The songs carry Grease for me, and most of them are impossible not to hum. The ending is a letdown, though. Sandy rebuilds herself from top to bottom while Danny makes a token gesture, and the film wants applause for that bargain. I enjoy it, but with reservations.
18. My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
“Maybe there won’t be marriage, maybe there won’t be sex, but by God there’ll be dancing.”
The romantic comedy that commits the genre’s most radical act: the protagonist loses. Julianne Potter spends the entire film trying to break up her best friend’s wedding so she can have him herself, and she fails, and the film ends with her dancing at the wedding she tried to destroy. Julia Roberts plays a woman who is, for most of the film, doing something wrong (manipulating people she claims to love, sabotaging a relationship out of selfishness) and the film is honest about this instead of softening it.
Rupert Everett’s George is the film’s secret weapon: Julianne’s gay best friend who arrives as her fake fiancé and stays to be her conscience, her audience, and the person who points out that she’s been treating everyone around her badly and needs to stop. His final dance with her (generous, loving, a real friend honoring a real friendship) justifies the film’s emotional resolution in a way the romantic plot can’t, because the romantic plot ends in honest failure. Friendship is what survives.
19. You’ve Got Mail (1998)
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⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
“Don’t you love New York in the fall?”
Nora Ephron’s second appearance on this list, and her most formally interesting film: Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox are enemies in person and unknowing intimates online.
That means the audience has information neither character has. We know who the other person is. They don’t. This double dramatic irony (we watch Joe gradually recognize Kathleen while watching Kathleen fall for a person she thinks is a stranger) produces an anxious pleasure that the film milks expertly across its running time.
This is also an elegy for one version of New York (the Upper West Side neighborhood bookstore, the fall leaves, the farmers market, the idea that a city could be a collection of small communities instead of a single overwhelming machine) that was already disappearing when Ephron made it. Kathleen’s store closes. Joe’s megastore wins. The film acknowledges this and then asks whether love is sufficient consolation for what is lost. Its answer is yes. That’s either romantically optimistic or complicit depending on your mood.
Kathleen’s little shop going under hurts more than most breakups in this genre, and I can’t fully accept the movie asking me to fall for the man whose megastore killed it. Joe Fox is charming enough to get away with it, mostly. That reservation is what keeps it out of my top tier, because everything else Ephron does here is lovely.
20. The First Wives Club (1996)
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
“Don’t get mad. Get everything.”
Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton (three women whose husbands have all left them for younger women) reunite at a mutual friend’s funeral and decide to stop suffering and ruin their ex-husbands professionally. The revenge comedy premise is pure wish fulfillment, and the film knows it and leans in. What makes it more than a fantasy is that all three performances are specific: each woman’s particular form of devastation and particular form of resourcefulness is distinct, and the coalition they form works because they pool differences.
In the last scene, they dance on a rooftop to “You Don’t Own Me,” which is either the most triumphant moment in the genre or the most shameless piece of audience manipulation depending on your cynicism level. It’s both at once, and the film earns neither apology nor defense. It’s a revenge fantasy executed with precision and joy by three women who are clearly having the time of their lives, and that joy is contagious even when the mechanism producing it’s completely transparent.
These films span every subgenre of women’s cinema. Master genre craft in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
Honorable Mentions: Twenty More Essential Watches
21. Notting Hill (1999)
Curtis and Roberts again, this time with Hugh Grant playing a man so ordinary that his ordinariness becomes its own form of appeal. The “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy” speech is the genre’s most quoted romantic declaration for a reason: it strips away every social armor and asks for something simple.
22. Practical Magic (1998)
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witch sisters whose family curse makes love fatal, literally. The romance is secondary to the sister relationship and the community of women who solve the problem together. Wildly underrated and strange in ways the marketing never communicated.
23. Miss Congeniality (2000)
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Undercover at a beauty pageant, Sandra Bullock plays a feminist FBI agent who gradually discovers she’s been condescending about the contestants. The transformation works because it runs both ways: Gracie changes, and so does her understanding of what she was dismissing.
24. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)
Two people running competing cons on each other who fall in love anyway. The premise requires both characters to be deceiving and sincere, which Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey manage through sheer charm. The revelation scene, where both cons are exposed, is sharper than the film usually gets credit for.
25. 13 Going on 30 (2004)
Jennifer Garner’s performance, playing a thirteen-year-old’s consciousness in a thirty-year-old body, is funnier and more specific than the film’s reputation allows. The body-swap premise produces real insight about what we sacrifice for social approval and what we can only recognize in retrospect.
26. Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Diane Lane buying a house in Italy after a divorce and rebuilding herself around it. The film is honest that recovery isn’t linear and that the new life you build isn’t necessarily the one you thought you were building. The romance is beside the point. The house is the point.
27. Sweet Home Alabama (2002)
Reese Witherspoon as a woman who escaped her hometown, made it in New York, and has to go back to tie up the loose end of an undissolved marriage. The film is more honest than most about what we leave behind when we reinvent ourselves and what that leaving costs the people left behind.
28. The Holiday (2006)
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Nancy Meyers’s house-swap romance is best understood as two separate films running at the same time, one featuring Jude Law and Cameron Diaz (charming but slight), one featuring Jack Black and Kate Winslet (unexpectedly moving). The Winslet storyline, about a woman learning to stop making herself small for men who don’t deserve the space she surrenders, is among the better things Meyers has written.
29. Enchanted (2007)
A Disney princess transported to real-world New York City, where her literal-minded fairy tale expectations encounter actual human complexity. Amy Adams is extraordinary (her commitment to Giselle’s sincerity is total) and the film’s central argument (that earnestness isn’t the same as naivety) is delivered through her performance.
30. Chocolat (2000)
Juliette Binoche opens a chocolate shop in a repressive French village during Lent, and the chocolate is a metaphor so unambiguous that the film practically underlines it in red. What saves it from its own allegory is Binoche’s performance and Alfred Molina’s complicated antagonist, who’s more interesting than the film’s moral structure requires.
31. Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
Australian dark comedy about a young woman who escapes a miserable family by reinventing herself in Sydney. P.J. Hogan’s film is funnier and darker than its ABBA soundtrack implies, and Toni Collette’s performance is the best debut in any film on this list.
32. Calendar Girls (2003)
Helen Mirren and Julie Walters as Yorkshire women who produce a nude calendar for charity and inadvertently become a media phenomenon. The film is based on a true story and derives most of its warmth from the real friendship between the leads, which feels real.
33. While You Were Sleeping (1995)
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Sandra Bullock accidentally becomes the fiancée of a comatose man and falls for his brother instead. The premise is absurd but the family dynamics are warm and specific, and Bullock’s loneliness in the opening minutes is established with enough specificity that the film deserves the happiness it eventually delivers.
This is the honorable mention I’m fondest of. Bullock plays loneliness without a shred of self-pity, and the family she stumbles into is so warm I’d have happily moved in with them myself. My only complaint is a middle stretch that coasts on charm a little too long.
34. Overboard (1987)
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell in a film whose premise, a man exploits an amnesiac woman’s vulnerability, is difficult to defend, and which works entirely because of the chemistry between two people who were in love in real life. Some films coast on charm and get away with it. This is one of them.
35. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)
Four friends sharing a pair of jeans that somehow fits all of them across a summer apart. The premise is magic realism deployed in the service of a story about female friendship surviving physical separation, and the four leads (America Ferrera, Alexis Bledel, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn) generate ensemble chemistry that the film uses well.
36. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)
Ellen Burstyn and Sandra Bullock in a mother-daughter story about how trauma transmits across generations. Uneven but with passages of real power, especially in the flashback sequences with Ashley Judd as young Vivi. The female friendship at the center (four women who have been each other’s lifeline for fifty years) is the film’s most convincing element.
37. Never Been Kissed (1999)
Drew Barrymore going undercover as a high school student for a story. The film is more about recovering from the damage of adolescent social humiliation than about the romance, and its final scene works because the film builds the humiliation before offering the reversal.
38. Kate & Leopold (2001)
Hugh Jackman as a nineteenth-century duke accidentally transported to contemporary New York. The time travel mechanics don’t bear examination and the film wisely avoids examining them. What works is Jackman’s specific quality of earnest attention (a man who listens and means what he says) as contrast to the ambient modern distraction around him.
39. The Proposal (2009)
► Read the full review of The Proposal (2009)
Here Sandra Bullock forces her assistant into a fake engagement to avoid deportation. Ryan Reynolds’s performance (managing complicated feelings about someone he has every reason to resent) is better than the material requires, and the Alaska family sequences give the film a warmth that the New York scenes lack.
40. Serendipity (2001)
John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale leaving their reunion to fate and then spending a decade trying to find each other anyway. The film is more honest about the anxiety of believing in fate than most romantic comedies allow. Cusack’s Jonathan is a study in the terror of someone who has decided to trust a sign and can’t stop second-guessing whether he’s reading it correctly.
What Do You Think?
After forty films, my verdict is that the eye-rolling says more about the man doing it than about the movies. These films took grief and friendship seriously while most of Hollywood was busy blowing things up, and plenty of them did it better than the prestige pictures that won the trophies. So what’s missing? What did I get wrong? And which one made the man in your life claim he had something in his eye? Drop a comment below.
