Film

Book Club

Four best friends of a certain age decide Fifty Shades of Grey is exactly the shake-up their book club needs, and chaos, wine, and long-overdue romance follow. It's glossy, silly, and unabashedly aimed at grown women who've been starved of stories where they get to be desired, funny, and messy again. Comfort food with a wink.

TMDb rating6.2

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80 for Brady2023no page yet

Four screen legends — Jane Fonda among them again — road-trip to the Super Bowl in a comedy that's basically Book Club's football cousin: silly, warm, unapologetically for women the industry usually ignores.

But The plot is thinner than tissue paper and the football stuff is pure background noise.

Poms2019no page yet

Diane Keaton starts a cheerleading squad in a retirement community, and it's exactly as sweetly defiant as it sounds — proof that reinvention doesn't have an expiry date.

But It leans harder into sentiment and less into the naughtiness that makes Book Club fun.

Grace and Frankie2015

Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, thrown together after their husbands leave them for each other, build something funnier and richer than either expected. More episodes to actually live in these women's lives.

But Seven seasons is a real commitment, and some later stretches wander further than they need to.

Grace and Frankie poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Harold and Maude1971

Same core idea as Book Club — an older woman refusing to be sidelined by desire or convention — but fifty years earlier, and gone completely feral with it.

A death-obsessed young man falls for a septuagenarian who steals cars and lives entirely on her own terms — the funniest, darkest argument ever made for age being no barrier to appetite or joy.

But It's deadpan and strange rather than cosy, and the central relationship is deliberately uncomfortable.

Harold and Maude poster
More like this (8)

The First Wives Club1996

Diane Keaton again, this time plotting revenge with Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn against the men who traded them in — sharper-toothed but the same DNA of women refusing to be written off.

But The comedy is broader and the tone angrier; less cosy, more claws-out.

The First Wives Club poster

It's Complicated2009no page yet

Meryl Streep rediscovers her ex-husband, and her own appetite, in a rom-com that treats a woman's sex life after fifty as completely unremarkable — which is exactly the point.

But Alec Baldwin's character is more grating than charming if you're not already sold on him.

Mamma Mia!2008no page yet

Pure joy, pure ABBA, pure Meryl Streep having the time of her life on a Greek island — the same friendship-and-freedom spirit as Book Club, cranked up to a full musical.

But You need genuine tolerance for jukebox-musical cheese; there's no irony button here.

Something's Gotta Give2003no page yet

Diane Keaton falls for Jack Nicholson in a beach house, in a film that basically invented the modern template for 'grown-up romance is allowed to be hot too.'

But It runs long and Nicholson's character takes a while to become likeable.

Calendar Girls2003no page yet

A group of British women pose nude for charity and discover the whole town — and themselves — differently along the way. Same warmth, same message about bodies and boldness, gentler delivery.

But It's cosier and more restrained; don't expect Book Club's raunch.

The Golden Girls1985

The original template: four women, one house, endless jokes about sex, ageing, and friendship that still land decades later. If you like the cast dynamic here, this is the source code.

But The sitcom format and eighties style will feel dated next to a glossy 2018 film.

The Golden Girls poster

Advanced Style2014no page yet

Book Club is fiction about reclaiming vitality in later life; this is the real thing, unscripted, and somehow just as fun.

A documentary following stylish women in their seventies, eighties and nineties strutting through New York in their own wildly personal fashion, utterly unbothered by being told to dress their age.

But There's no plot, just portraits — if you need narrative momentum, this will feel slow.

45 Years2015

Same terrain — women in later life reckoning with desire and the past — played with total seriousness instead of Book Club's sunny comic register.

Charlotte Rampling gives a devastating performance as a woman whose marriage quietly cracks open a week before her anniversary, when an old ghost resurfaces. A masterclass in what's said by what isn't.

But It is slow, aching, and entirely without jokes — the tonal opposite of a wine-and-laughs comedy.

45 Years poster

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