Film

Little Women

Name: Little Women
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 2019
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern

Greta Gerwig's take on Alcott's novel scrambles the chronology, cross-cutting between the March sisters' girlhood and their scattered adult lives, so nostalgia and disappointment argue with each other in real time. It's lush, funny, and quietly furious about what ambition costs women. Warm ensemble filmmaking for people who want their comfort read with some bite.

TMDb rating

7.8

If you liked this

Pride & Prejudice2005

Joe Wright's version has the same tactile, breathless romanticism — muddy hems, candlelit rooms, a Dario Marianelli score doing half the emotional work. If you wanted more Jo-and-Laurie energy, this is the Darcy-and-Elizabeth equivalent.

But Slightly more conventional in structure — no fractured timeline, just a straight, gorgeous march toward the ending you know.

Sense and Sensibility1995

Emma Thompson's screenplay gives Austen's sisters the same mix of tenderness and sharp comic timing Gerwig brings to the Marches, and the money troubles feel just as real.

But More restrained emotionally — English reserve rather than March-family openness. Less crying, more clenched jaws.

Lady Bird2017

Gerwig's other film about a headstrong young woman fighting her mother and her circumstances to become a writer. Same director, same DNA, contemporary setting, even funnier.

But No sprawling ensemble — it's one girl, one mother, one town. Smaller and spikier than the sisterly warmth of Little Women.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Meet Me in St. Louis1944

Same structural bones: a family of sisters, a house that becomes a character, and a story more interested in the texture of home than in plot. Different genre, three-quarters of a century earlier, and the wistfulness that Gerwig cuts with fury here plays completely sincere.

A Technicolor MGM musical about four sisters growing up together in a house full of noise and love, with the same ache for a vanishing girlhood that runs under Gerwig's film.

But It's a full-blown musical — Judy Garland breaks into song where Jo March would break into an argument.

Emma.2020

Anya Taylor-Joy leads a candy-colored, cheekily stylish Austen adaptation that treats period drama as something to have fun with, much like Gerwig does.

But Emma Woodhouse is deliberately more insufferable than any March sister — the film asks you to enjoy her flaws, not root for her.

A Room with a View1986

E.M. Forster's story of a young woman choosing passion over propriety, filmed with the same Merchant Ivory lushness and genuine warmth toward its characters' contradictions.

But Slower and more mannered — this is 1980s British heritage cinema at its most unhurried.

Anne with an E2017

A fierce, imaginative girl fighting to be a writer and to be taken seriously in a world built for someone quieter — Anne Shirley is basically Jo March with an orphanage backstory.

But Three seasons is a real commitment, and it leans harder into social-issue plotlines than the book or Little Women ever did.

Marriage Story2019

Directed by Gerwig's partner Noah Baumbach, released the same year, and wrestling with the same question — what a woman gives up, or doesn't, for love and art.

But This is a divorce, not a coming-of-age — raw, adult, and considerably less cozy.

The Age of Innocence1993

Scorsese's least expected film: a period drama about the quiet violence of social convention, gorgeously dressed and devastating in exactly the way Gerwig's ending is devastating.

But Colder and more claustrophobic — Wharton's world offers far less warmth than Alcott's.

Little Dorrit2008

A BBC Dickens adaptation about a family navigating poverty, pride, and each other with real tenderness — sprawling, novelistic, and unexpectedly moving in its domestic detail.

But Fourteen episodes is a lot to ask, and Dickensian plotting means more subplots than March-family focus.

Only Yesterday1991

It's Little Women's timeline trick — memory interrupting the present — done in anime, about a Japanese woman instead of a Massachusetts one, asking the same question Gerwig's Jo asks: what do you owe the girl you used to be?

A Studio Ghibli film, directed by Isao Takahata, about a woman remembering her adolescence — the sisters, the small humiliations, the path not taken — while deciding who she still wants to become.

But Gentle and slow by design, with no romance to root for and animation some viewers won't expect for such an interior, adult story.

A League of Their Own1992

Same engine, different costume: sisters whose rivalry and love get tangled up with what each is allowed to want. Where Jo fights for a room of her own, Dottie and Kit fight for a place on the field — the register is loud and comic where Gerwig's is tender, but the argument underneath is identical.

Geena Davis and Lori Petty play sisters competing and colliding as they build the first women's professional baseball league — funny, brash, and sneakily about the exact same bind: ambition versus what the world expects of a woman.

But Broad studio comedy energy throughout — big laughs, big crowd scenes, none of Little Women's melancholy or restraint.