14 Amazing Movies On Female Friendships That You Need To Watch Right Away

When god said, "Let there be light", she was talking about girlfriends.

1. Frances Ha

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Yeah, breakups are sad, but has your best friend ever moved away to a different country? Being in one’s twenties might, “feel like a novel — dense and vivid, uncertain of the end", and Frances Halladay’s (Greta Gerwig) life sings the same song. Her struggling would-be-dancer career isn’t conducive to financial or mental stability either. But life can be summed up in exactly three words — “it goes on”. As Frances and her best friend find their way back to each other, we see a story of sailing in and out of the trials and tribulations of the (roaring?) twenties unfold.  

2. Booksmart

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Girl best friends seize academic validation, encourage each other’s love lives, think of pornography as sex education, raid parties, get arrested, and indulge their unchecked teenage hormones as best as they can. Stop asking them, “Wyd?”. They are literally just teenagers and have their entire lives ahead of them to figure things out.  

3. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

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Best friends, Lena (Alexis Bledel), Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), Carmen (America Ferrera), and Bridget (Blake Lively), come across a pair of jeans that miraculously fits all of them. Wake up, fans of literary devices! New motif just dropped. As the girls spend their first summer away from each other, sometimes frolicking and sometimes foundering through life, this pair of jeans becomes the calm to their individual storms.

4. Girls Trip

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Ryan (Regina Hall) organises a girls’ trip for her friends, hoping it will bring out the BITCH in everyone if by BITCH we mean Blessed with Intelligence, Thoughtfulness, Charm, and Hotness. All of them have struggles of their own, which include financial hiccups, unemployment, single parenthood, and the like. This trip will see them living telenovela levels of drama, which may not be sustainable in the long run, but does work wonders in facilitating their reconnection with one another.

5. Parched

Ajay Devgn FFilms

It’s better to age like fine wine — cooped up inside a dark storeroom, untouched — than to be with the men we encounter in Parched. Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee), Lajjo (Radhika Apte), Bijli (Surveen Chawla), and Janki (Lehar Khan) are tired of men with egos as big as the Great Wall Of China — raping, abusing, disrespecting, and terrorising them. However, the women are not destined for mediocrity and acquiescence, so they flee the banes of their lives for good. Is it a coincidence that "bane" somewhat rhymes with "men"? 

6. Book Club

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You are in his DMs while Vivian (Jane Fonda), Diane (Diane Keaton), Sharon (Candice Bergen), and Carol (Mary Steenburgen) are reading Fifty Shades Of Grey and figuring out what the he(s) in their lives should do to make them happier. How are the women supposed to live, love, laugh in a society that keeps them from implementing the pleasure principle in their lives and thrives on their silence? Stop normalising the grind, instead normalise girlfriends rebelling together against whoever tries to infantilise them and invalidate their needs.

7. Girlhood

Hold Up Films

Marieme (Karidja Touré), a teenager, is in a pickle. Her abusive brother is mostly in charge of the household and academia adds to her burdens. Her situation is so dire that even the prospect of losing one’s mind will seem as smooth-sailing as eating cake in comparison. This is when she befriends Lady (Assa Sylla), Fily (Mariétou Touré), and Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh), who despite being in their (un)friendly, neighbourhood anarchist era, provide Marieme with a sense of security and belonging.

8. Steel Magnolias

Tri-Star Pictures

Once upon a not so forgotten time, lived a group of girls in a northwestern Louisiana town. They prepare for weddings, suffer from fatal illnesses, lose their dear ones, and experience insurmountable grief together. When life throws punches at them, they hold each other close because, “people are vivid and small and don’t live very long”.

Moral of the story — The collective noun of a squad of girlfriends is called home.

9. Veere Di Wedding

Balaji Motion Pictures

Kalindi (Kareena Kapoor Khan), Avni (Sonam Kapoor Ahuja), Sakshi (Swara Bhaskar), and Meera (Shikha Talsania) are living lives that resemble convoluted IKEA furniture because putting them together is quite a task. Societal pressure to get married, impractical familial expectations, impending divorce, and other side-effects of being alive cloud their lives. But paradise is not lost, after all. It exists in the company of one’s girlfriends. Kalindi and co. will soon realise this and march ahead to tackle their problems head-on. 

10. Thelma & Louise

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Best friends, Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise’s (Susan Sarandon) zeal for life is as much as one can muster while getting a colonoscopy. To evade the dreariness, they set out on a weekend vacation and that’s where the trouble begins. From beating up predators to outsmarting cops, this duo really said, “Once two girlfriends join forces, it’s over for everyone else.” Do they pronounce themselves sapphists and live to see another day? Who knows! But what matters is, as Rihanna intended, they do find love, in whichever form it may be, in a hopeless place.

11. Pink

Rising Sun Films

Raunak (Raashul Tandon), Vishwajyoti (Tushar Pandey), and Rajveer (Angad Bedi), really prove that their bodies are not temples, but rather torture devices. Andrea (Andrea Tariang), Falak (Kirti Kulhari), and Minal (Taapsee Pannu) are busy minding their own business when these three men decide to make their existence everyone’s problem. They strategically isolate the women to harass them, which further leads to a court case and heinous accusations being hurled at the women. However, Andrea, Falak, and Minal put the "we" in "girl power" and hold their heads high.

PS: Our society is the real multiverse of madness which, even in the 21st century, feels the topic of consent is up for debate.

12. Now and Then

New Line Cinema

“Our daughters are completely fine”. Your daughters are having adventures at the cemetery, trying to earn money to build a treehouse, having their first kisses, discovering obscure family history, and having the time of their lives, while journeying towards self-actualisation. They are not fine. They are the FINEST of the lot and deserve to be protected at all costs.

13. Hidden Figures

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Welcome to the darkest days of antiquity — 1960s USA to be precise — when we are still discoursing over whether Black women deserve rights. Katherine (Taraji P. Henson), Mary (Janelle Monáe), and Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) work at Langley Research Centre where racism is the main course served in generous proportions, along with a topping of misogyny. The struggle to be on the right side of history is real and white people fail miserably. Albeit, nothing can deter Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy from becoming who they are meant to become, as they “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Devout devotees of testosterone and racism, make way or get stomped.

14. Aisha

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Aisha (Sonam Kapoor) thinks of herself as Cupid but, in truth, she is a more disastrous rendition — if you can believe that — of Sima Taparia from Indian Matchmaking at best. She acts like a meddlesome desi relative, tries to decide for her friends whom they should date, and treats them not as people, but as projects. While this film sounds like an outlier, in the end, Aisha redeems herself. As is typical of mature female friendships, her girlfriends understand that to err is human and pledge, “Yes, I will take you. I will love you, again.”