Film

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Name: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Genre: Romance, Drama
Released: 1974
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Kris Kristofferson, Harvey Keitel, Diane Ladd

Social drama

A woman starts over after her husband's death, chasing a singing career with her young son in tow. Schrader's first feature is tender and unsentimental—it lets Alice be flawed, determined, and funny by turns. It's for anyone who's felt stuck and wondered if reinvention was possible, or just a lovely fantasy.

TMDb rating

3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like stories built on messy relationships and a heroine's stubborn, funny refusal to give up, told through a rough, unglamorous road where the plot never tidies itself up.

Skip it if you want a clear arc with brisk momentum, since its scenes linger on small talk, diner routines and awkward dates, and its mood can feel loose and episodic.

What it asks of you: Long stretches of ordinary days, unhurried scenes, and a mood that swings between easy warmth and sudden sharpness; settle in for a little over two hours.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Norma Rae1979

Sally Field in an Oscar-winning role as a textile worker who becomes a union organizer. Like Alice, it's about a woman finding her voice and agency, but it trades the intimacy of the diner for the momentum of collective action.

But It can feel didactic in places, and the romance subplot sometimes overwhelms the political spine you want to follow.

Five Easy Pieces1970

Jack Nicholson as a drifter avoiding his family and past, searching for something he can't quite name. Same restless energy as Alice, same period aesthetic, same willingness to sit with a character's contradictions without judgment.

But It's darker and more deliberately alienating—there's no warmth in it, and the ending offers no comfort.

Network1976

Paddy Chayefsky's savage comedy about a TV newsman losing his grip on reality. Like Alice, it's a character study embedded in a working-world drama, with dialogue that sings and a protagonist who's both sympathetic and deeply flawed.

But It's an intellectual showpiece that sometimes values being right over being true. The satire can feel heavy-handed in retrospect.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Nights of Cabiria1957

Both are character studies of women surviving through resilience and sex work, finding humor and dignity in precarity. Both trust the audience to love a flawed woman without needing her to be redeemed.

Fellini's roman prostitute Cabiria shares Alice's exhaustion and resilience—the same refusal to be diminished by circumstance, the same searching for connection. But Cabiria's is a Neorealist tragedy, not an American road movie.

But It's in Italian, it's from a different era entirely, and it ends in heartbreak rather than possibility.

An Unmarried Woman1978

Jill Clayburgh as a woman rebuilding her life after divorce. It has the same quiet feminist DNA as Alice—the same belief that a woman's interior life is interesting enough to sustain a film for two hours.

But The therapy scenes haven't aged well, and the ending capitulates to romantic fantasy in a way Alice never does.

Klute1971

Jane Fonda in one of her finest performances, as a sex worker navigating her own agency and survival. It's darker than Alice, but shares an unflinching interest in how women actually live and think.

But It's a thriller first, which can distract from the character work. Some of the genre machinery feels dated now.

Alice in the Cities1974

Wim Wenders' film from the same year: a man and a young girl traveling through America, bonding over displacement and the open road. It has Alice's episodic structure and its gentle, wandering rhythm.

But It's meditative to the point of inertia—very few plot beats, lots of watching people exist in motels and diners.

Hester Street1975

Carol Kane as an immigrant woman navigating marriage, work, and assimilation on New York's Lower East Side. Small-scale, beautifully observed, about women making practical choices in constrained circumstances.

But It's very slow and very quiet. The black-and-white cinematography can feel more like a period lesson than an emotional experience.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1976

Both films center women's invisible labor and the small acts of self-preservation that add up to survival. Both refuse to dramatize women's lives—they just show them, carefully.

Chantal Akerman's three-hour chamber piece about a widow and her domestic routine. It's radically different in form—almost plotless, hypnotic, avant-garde—but it asks the same question: how do we structure meaning from dailiness?

But It's glacially paced and deliberately 'boring.' There's no conventional drama or narrative momentum. It demands patience that most viewers won't have.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles poster

3 Women1977

Both are interested in how women reinvent themselves through gesture and performance, and how identity is provisional, constructed moment to moment. Both trust the audience to live in ambiguity.

Robert Altman's elliptical psychological puzzle set in a dusty California desert town. Three women of different ages orbit each other in a slow-motion narrative that's really about projection and identity. Desert motel, waitress-adjacent world, same era, same dreaminess.

But It's genuinely confusing—deliberately so. The narrative dissolves at the end rather than resolving, and Altman refuses to explain himself.