The 8 Best Friendship Movies To Watch With Your BFFs This Weekend

The Best Friendship Movies To Watch

Steel Magnolias

The oldest film on this list is 1989’s Steel Magnolias (dir. Herbert Ross). The iconic cast boasts Dolly Parton as Truvy, the owner of a small beauty salon in Louisiana. The lives of six women intersect as clients of the salon, their ages and class backgrounds entirely different upon first blush.

But through the power of the lush, feminine late '80s beauty salon as a meeting spot, friendships form fast and hard. There are no bounds to showing up for each other; weddings, funerals, and everything in between share the same attendance record, holding each other tightly through it all.

Steel Magnolias also teaches about the importance of honesty with those you love the most (but maybe don’t be as brutal with friendly constructive criticism as Clairee and Ouiser are).

Book Club

These core four women of Book Club (dir. Bill Holderman) have met every month for their book club for longer than most of the women in these other films have been alive. After a while, it feels like they've run out of things to read, though. The stagnancy of their club is given a much-needed livening up upon reading Fifty Shades of Grey — and realizing there’s more to life’s pleasures and freedoms than they’d previously capitalized on.

Book Club is especially unique and fun to watch at any age, bolstering an inspiring notion that you’re never too old to start doing something new.

Joy Ride

Joy Ride follows a pair of besties on a trip to China to close a business deal… which quickly goes haywire (in the best way) as they run into promiscuous old roommates and a surprise visit from a biological family. You probably already know Stephanie Hsu from her Academy Award-nominated performance in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, but you won’t want to miss her in this entirely different — yet not totally dissimilar? — role.

Girls Trip

Girls Trip runs a similar gamut to Joy Ride, fronted by comedic legend Tiffany Haddish and an excellent supporting cast of other familiar faces. Ever felt lost after college, separated from your friends after having an excuse to be together 24/7 in classes and study abroad trips? Girls Trip has your nostalgia covered, following Ryan Pierce (Haddish) as she attempts to reconnect with her old BFFs in New Orleans, inviting them to a music festival… because nothing ever goes wrong in New Orleans, right?

Bridesmaids

If there's one ultimate film of female absurdity, it's Bridesmaids (2011, dir. Paul Feig). If you haven’t seen it, please stop reading and go turn it on immediately. (Kidding—you can finish this list and then go watch.) Kristen Wiig wrote a film about the maid of honor for her best friend’s upcoming wedding, and her fellow bridesmaids, all varying degrees of disorderly in juxtaposition to the (seemingly) perfect bride-to-be.

In case you need more reasons to watch, the cast boasts an abundance of comedic geniuses, apart from Kristen Wiig. With Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Rebel Wilson, and others helming the film, you’ll be laughing until you cry (Let’s hope that, unlike the poor women in one particular scene, this is as far as your bodily reactions to Bridesmaids go.)

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

The Sisterhood of the Traveling PantsSisterhood of the Traveling Pantsis another classic, uniting four entirely unlikely friends as they start to grow up and discover themselves as the end of high school grows near. Distraught that they’ll be separated for the summer, the girls find their friendship bond further strengthened by a thrifted pair of jeans that inexplicably fits them all perfectly.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants celebrates girls of all different body types, personalities (whether you’re artsy like Tibby or sporty like Bridget), and emotionally tumultuous journeys.

Booksmart

If you and your bestie are anything like Alexis Bledel’s Lena in Sisterhood, Booksmart might just be the perfect movie to settle down with on a Saturday night. Following two extremely type-A, extremely high-achieving seniors played by Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever, Booksmart teaches viewers that letting loose a little won’t diminish all your hard work along the way—in fact, it may be just what the doctor ordered. And in a welcome turn of events from the relationships in the previous films, this one features LGBTQ+ representation!

Little Women

And finally, the least obvious (or most, depending on how you look at it) film about female friendship: Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019). Now, I’ve never had a sister, and I know from my friends with sisters that these relationships can be more testy than those of us with brothers.

But that’s the beauty of Little Women; these sisters do unforgivably mean things to each other, but love each other despite it all. Little Women teaches us the power of enduring familial love, a message that could even be extended past family so that we might give some of our friends an extra moment or two of grace in their times of need.