The 10 best female buddy films

Big-screen portrayals of female friendship are far less common than those of their male counterparts—unless, that is, the women are bonding over men. Otherwise, the movies often seemed flat-out ambivalent about friendships among women. That imbalance is exactly why the release of Thelma & Louise in 1991 landed as a cultural event rather than just another good movie—it wasn’t only that it was excellent, but that it dared to graft the male buddy film’s freedom, danger, and moral ambiguity onto two women.

Even some of Hollywood’s best of the genre, such as The Women and Stage Door, are fraught with relationships that are competitive, resentful, and prone to rupture. The women’s rights movement moved things forward, but pictures like Bridesmaids, Booksmart, and Girls Trip—where female bonding can be profane and messy—are a relatively new phenomenon.

10. Girls Trip (2017, dir. Malcolm D. Lee)

This raucous comedy from Malcolm D. Lee and writers Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver details a reunion of four besties from college. The self-proclaimed “Flossy Posse” consists of successful self-help guru Ryan (Regina Hall), gossip website maven Sasha (Queen Latifah), tightly wound single mom Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), and über-uninhibited party animal Dina (Tiffany Haddish). Their weekend at the Essence Music Fest in New Orleans is tempered by the revelation that Ryan’s ex-NFL player husband (Mike Colter) is cheating on her with a hot social media influencer (Deborah Ayorinde). There are some bumps along the way, as the movie veers from gross-out gags to squirm-inducing sentimentality. But the four leads are charming and reflect the dynamics of longtime friends who have learned to accept—or at least put up with—one another’s foibles. Not even a scene of Lisa urinating while ziplining over a crowd of revelers can piss away the goodwill that Girls Trip has built.

9. Fried Green Tomatoes (1991, dir. Jon Avnet)

This adaptation of Fannie Flagg’s bestseller offers two parallel tales of female friendship. The first, set in 1930s Alabama, involves Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson), a free spirit whose rejection of gender stereotypes makes her an unlikely friend for Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker), the product of an old-guard Southern family. The two operate a cafe and, although the film only obliquely acknowledges it, share a long-term romantic relationship. Their story is recounted by Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), a nursing home resident who takes a shine to Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), a Birmingham housewife who is enchanted by Ninny’s vivid recollections. The strength of Ruth and Idgie inspires Evelyn, whose confidence begins to blossom with her every visit to Ninny. Jon Avnet occasionally allows lapses into the maudlin, and a queasy resolution to a cannibalism subplot strains credibility. Paradoxically, it is the framing story, not the flashback romance, that is most successful—perhaps because Tandy and Bates bring an unforced warmth to a friendship that Ruth and Idgie’s story cannot quite match.

8. Booksmart (2019, dir. Olivia Wilde)

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut seemed to herald a new strain of teen comedy: madcap high jinks for the young and “woke.” At first blush, the misadventures of Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) on their last day of high school play like a girl-centric version of Superbad (2007), but the similarities to that bromance are largely superficial. The screenplay by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman includes raunchy humor, but Booksmart offers the type of brainy, ambitious, and self-actualized young women who rarely show up in teen-centric pictures. Amy is a lesbian, Molly straight, but there is no handwringing over their sexual orientation. Instead, they are more stumped by how they’ve sworn off four years of partying to get into Ivy League universities when their peers didn’t make the same sacrifices and are still headed to the same schools. Amy laments to Molly how she’s been sadly honest with her parents: “It isn’t you who has to deal with their awkward looks when I say that I’m going to the library with you and I’m actually going to the library with you.”
(See more in The 15 best school-centric films.)

7. The Women (1939, dir. George Cukor)

The Women doesn’t offer a particularly healthy take on friendship. The scheming Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) gets a kick out of making sure her friend, Mary Haines (Norma Shearer), knows her husband Stephen is cheating with a man-eating, perfume-counter salesgirl named Crystal (Joan Crawford). Then again, Mary gets her digs in at Sylvia, too. “Frenemy” is the default relationship setting for these Manhattan society women. In this melodramatic adaptation of Clare Boothe Luce’s Broadway play, the wives routinely trade gossip, barbs, and figurative knives in the back. “There’s a word for you ladies,” Crystal observes, “but it’s seldom used in high society outside of a kennel.” Mary’s most supportive friends are divorcees—played by Mary Boland, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Fontaine—who rally around her after she and Stephen separate, even if George Cukor and screenwriters Anita Loos and Jane Murfin approach divorce as a fate worse than death. The film’s title is a testament to truth in advertising, featuring some 120 speaking roles with not a whiff of testosterone in sight.

6. Steel Magnolias (1989, dir. Herbert Ross)

Steel Magnolias’ reputation as an essential “chick flick” can obscure how damned entertaining a film it truly is. While Robert Harling’s script, based on his play, follows an array of multigenerational women connected to a small-town Louisiana beauty salon, at the center is Sally Field as M’Lynn, a stylist whose diabetic daughter Shelby (a pre-superstardom Julia Roberts) is getting married. The movie comes from a knowing place; Harling based his play on the death of his sister from complications of Type 1 diabetes. Herbert Ross rarely lets a heartwarming moment pass without shamelessly milking it dry. The director was anything but warm on the set, however, where he reportedly bullied Roberts so mercilessly that more seasoned cast members stepped in to her defense. Thankfully, there is genuine affection on screen, as well as terrific performances from Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Dolly Parton, and Daryl Hannah. Steel Magnolias earns its tears because it first earns its laughs.

5. Ghost World (2001, dir. Terry Zwigoff)

Terry Zwigoff’s deadpan adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ underground comic captures the pitfalls of a friendship forged by misanthropy. Recent high school graduates Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) are themselves outliers in their class, but their métier is mocking anyone who falls outside their ever-shrinking parameters of quirky cool. With no plans for college, the sisters in snark anticipate getting an apartment together, but the plans hit a snag when Enid is unable to hold a job for long. She develops a wobbly friendship with Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a lonely, middle-aged nerd who collects old records. Rebecca, the nominally less eccentric of the friends, is having none of it, telling Enid she is sick of the “creeps, losers, and weirdos” who comprise Seymour’s social orbit. “But those are our people,” Enid protests. Birch shines in her follow-up to American Beauty. Her Enid is alternately malicious and kind, cruel and generous—but always with the vague resentment of someone who knows the world will never be to her liking. The disaffected come of age, too, but their epiphanies can be even more disaffecting. 

4. Frances Ha (2012, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote the script with Frances Ha star (and future wife) Greta Gerwig, modeled the titular character on his lead actress. The familiarity shows. Frances Ha, a young dancer and choreographer trying to make her way in New York, is a fully realized person—gawky, insecure, eager to please. A character who meets Frances expresses surprise that she’s 27: “You seem a lot older, but not as grown up.” At the center of this comedy-drama is Frances’ complicated friendship with roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner, daughter of the recording artist Sting). Their relationship is showing fissures as Sophie’s life moves in a direction that Frances cannot follow—a circumstance recognizable to most sentient creatures who have experienced the evolving power dynamics of a close friendship. Stylistically, the black-and-white picture occupies a space between Woody Allen’s verbal dexterity and French New Wave naturalism. What makes the central relationship so affecting is that neither woman is in the wrong. Sophie’s progress is understandable, while Frances’ sense of abandonment is painfully real.

3. Stage Door (1937, dir. Gregory La Cava)

The ensemble cast in Stage Door is impressive, but top billing belongs to the picture’s keen understanding of female ambition. That’s what really steals the show in this comedy about the friendships, aspirations, and disappointments in a New York City rooming house full of wannabe actresses. Ginger Rogers is the wiseacre, Katharine Hepburn the smart sophisticate. They butt heads immediately—as RKO’s top female stars at the time, the two clashed offscreen, too—but develop a grudging respect for one another. Camaraderie reigns in the house. Gail Patrick is the golddigger, Eve Arden the smartass, and a then-26-year-old Lucille Ball is the gal with a rotating parade of lunkhead escorts from the Pacific Northwest. Andrea Leeds earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress as the sweet one headed for tragedy. Gregory La Cava infuses Stage Door with the brisk pace and overlapping dialogue of a screwball comedy, but less funny is how it examines the power imbalance between the sexes, particularly in show business. The film makes clear that these women’s professional fortunes are tied to the men with whom they flatter and flirt.

2. Thelma & Louise (1991, dir. Ridley Scott)

In creating one of film’s most provocative works of feminism, director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Callie Khouri also provided one of the most moving portraits of female friendship. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are, respectively, the titular Thelma and Louise, who embark on a road trip that takes a dark turn when Louise shoots and kills a man who tries to rape Thelma. The film sparked a cultural firestorm. Time put the actresses on its cover the summer of the movie’s release, while editorials denounced the picture as “male bashing”—evidence that a film about two women taking control of their own story could still provoke a backlash in 1991. Davis, who formed a close friendship with Sarandon offscreen, admits in her memoir that she was astonished by how enthusiastically women embraced the picture. “It brought home for me in a very powerful way how rarely we give women the chance to feel that way coming out of a movie,” she writes in Dying of Politeness: A Memoir. “Men can come out of almost every movie having identified with the lead character … and feeling empowered.” Thelma and Louise begin as friends escaping routine for a weekend; they end as partners who have freed each other from lives defined by male control. Their final clasped hands turn a desperate act into an image of female solidarity.
( See more in The 10 best road-trip movies.)

1. Bridesmaids (2011, dir. Paul Feig)

With Bridesmaids, screenwriters Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo proved that female-centric comedies could be just as crass as the bromance variety that Bridesmaids producer Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) had popularized. Wiig and Maya Rudolph play besties Annie and Lillian, respectively, whose decades-long friendship is tested after Lillian announces she is engaged to be married. Annie accepts the maid-of-honor role with some ambivalence, fearing that her BFF’s impending nuptials will spell the end of their closeness. Annie gets an additional jolt when one of Lillian’s pushy new friends, played with prissy perfection by Rose Byrne, starts to horn in on maid-of-honor territory. Competition and jealousy among friends are hardly a gender-specific phenomenon, but Bridesmaids lampoons it from a sharp and sympathetic place, without scrimping on raunchy humor. For that latter trait, the movie’s secret weapon is Melissa McCarthy in a breakthrough performance as Lillian’s outrageous sister-in-law-to-be. The gross-out gags are great fun, but as AV Club’s Gwen Ihnat noted, “what’s more remarkable is how it mapped the beats of a romantic comedy onto a story about female friendship.”
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Honorable mention: Bend It Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985, dir. Susan Seidelman), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, dir. Howard Hawks), Girlhood (2014, dir. Céline Sciamma), Kamikaze Girls (2004, dir. Tetsuya Nakashima), Muriel’s Wedding (1994, dir. P.J. Hogan), Now and Then (1995, dir. Lesli Linka Glatter), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997, dir. David Mirkin), Set It Off (1996, dir. F. Gary Gray), Support the Girls (2018, dir. Andrew Bujalski)