Film

Beaches

A shrieking, weeping, singing monument to the messy female friendship movie — CC Bloom and Hillary Whitney love each other, envy each other, and wreck each other's lives across three decades, all scored to Bette Midler ballads. It's shameless, overlong, and works anyway because Midler and Hershey commit completely. Bring tissues; bring also a willingness to laugh at the excess.

TMDb rating6.7

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Terms of Endearment1983

The gold standard for the laugh-then-sob genre — a mother and daughter locked in decades of love and friction, with a third-act gut-punch Beaches is clearly indebted to.

But The tonal whiplash from screwball comedy to hospital drama is jarring if you're not braced for it.

Terms of Endearment poster

Steel Magnolias1989

Same year, same spirit — a Southern beauty-parlor ensemble trading barbed one-liners while grief quietly moves in. Sally Field's final scene is a masterclass in earned hysteria.

But It's stagey and quote-heavy; if you dislike films that feel like plays, it'll show.

Steel Magnolias poster

Fried Green Tomatoes1991

A friendship spanning generations, told in flashback, with warmth, menace, and a surprising amount of steel underneath the comfort-food surface. A cousin to Beaches with better pacing.

But The framing device and Southern-Gothic sweetness can feel syrupy if you're after something leaner.

Fried Green Tomatoes poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Old Acquaintance1943no page yet

This is Beaches' great-grandmother — the same asymmetric friendship (glamorous striver vs. quieter counterpart), the same jealousy simmering under decades of affection, forty-five years earlier.

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins as lifelong friends and rivals — one a serious novelist, one a shameless bestseller machine — locked in decades of love, envy and one unforgettable shaking scene.

But Studio-era pacing and dialogue will feel stiff and theatrical next to Beaches' melodrama.

More like this (8)

The Way We Were1973

Streisand and Redford as opposites who shouldn't work and do, for a while — the template for the doomed-mismatch romance Beaches borrows its ache from.

But It's slower and more political than you might expect from the poster.

The Way We Were poster

Stepmom1998no page yet

Another film willing to sit with illness without flinching, using two very different women forced into intimacy — the emotional machinery is nearly identical to Beaches' back half.

But It leans hard into its tearjerker beats; manipulative if you're feeling cynical that day.

Now and Then1995

Childhood friendship revisited in adulthood, girls-becoming-women nostalgia with a real sense of what holds a friend group together over time.

But It's gentler and lower-stakes — nobody's stealing anybody's boyfriend here.

Now and Then poster

My Best Friend's Wedding1997

Julia Roberts as the less likable half of a friendship, which is the CC Bloom trick — a lead you root for even while wincing at her.

But It's a rom-com at heart, so the stakes never approach Beaches' late-film gravity.

My Best Friend's Wedding poster

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood2002no page yet

A friendship group with buried history and a daughter untangling her mother's past — very much operating in Beaches' emotional key, secrets and all.

But The ensemble is large and the plot mechanics creak; it asks patience for its payoff.

Waiting to Exhale1995

Four women, one soundtrack doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting, friendship as the thing that survives when the men don't — a spiritual sibling in structure and mood.

But It's more ensemble than duo, so the specific intensity of a two-hander is diluted.

Waiting to Exhale poster

Grey Gardens1976

Swap fictional friends for a real codependent duo and you get the same central question Beaches asks: what happens when one person needs the stage and the other needs to be needed?

A real mother and daughter, once socialites, now performing for each other and the camera in a decaying mansion — a documentary about people who never stop being 'on.'

But It's uncomfortable and voyeuristic in a way fiction softens; some viewers find it exploitative rather than moving.

Grey Gardens poster

Single White Female1992

Same engine as CC and Hillary — one woman's gravity pulling another out of her own life — run through a genre that lets the darkness in the friendship win instead of love.

A dazzling, magnetic woman and the quieter friend drawn into her orbit — except here the obsession curdles into a genuinely unnerving thriller.

But It's a horror-adjacent thriller with real menace; not what you want if you're after warmth and singalongs.

Single White Female poster

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Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes, Terms of Endearment, Now and Then, Love Story, All About My Mother