Film

My Girl

My Girl is a coming-of-age comedy that ambushes you halfway through with real grief. Vada's summer of poetry crushes, funeral-home mischief and one extraordinary friendship plays as goofy family sitcom until it suddenly isn't. Anna Chlumsky and a young Macaulay Culkin carry it without ever seeming coached. Best for anyone who wants nostalgia with an actual emotional cost attached.

TMDb rating7.4

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Stand by Me1986

The template for kids-confronting-death-on-a-summer-adventure, told with the same unsentimental tenderness. If My Girl's tonal whiplash worked for you, this is the film that perfected it a few years earlier.

But More boys' adventure than domestic drama, and its ending lands as elegy rather than shock.

Stand by Me poster

Now and Then1995no page yet

Four girls, one small-town summer, and the same mix of first crushes and creeping awareness of mortality, just filtered through a female friendship instead of a boy-girl one.

But Leans harder into nostalgia-soundtrack sentimentality than My Girl ever does.

The Sandlot1993

All the sun-drenched, low-stakes summer-of-childhood texture of My Girl's best stretches, with none of its grief. Pure comfort food for anyone who wants the friendship without the ambush.

But Skips the emotional gut-punch entirely — if you loved My Girl for making you cry, this won't.

The Sandlot poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Ordinary People1980

My Girl earns its ending through a child's eyes; Ordinary People shows what that same loss looks like from inside an adult household years later, when nobody can say the right thing.

The unflinching, quietly devastating portrait of a family failing to talk about grief — the version of My Girl's themes with all the childhood sweetness stripped away.

But There's no comic relief, no childhood wonder, just grown adults failing each other. It asks a lot emotionally.

Ordinary People poster
More like this (8)

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial1982

A lonely kid, an unlikely best friend, and the slow dread that something you love this much might not get to stay. Spielberg wrote the other great version of that fear.

But Science fiction wrapping means the tone is wonder more than melancholy.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial poster

Bridge to Terabithia2007

A childhood friendship built on imagination that gets cut short in a way that still blindsides adults watching it for the first time. Closest modern cousin to My Girl's tonal trick.

But The fantasy sequences can feel like studio-mandated spectacle bolted onto a quieter story.

Bridge to Terabithia poster

A Little Princess1995

A young girl's imagination and resilience against loss and an unstable home life, shot with a fairy-tale visual richness My Girl never attempts but shares its emotional register.

But More ornate and Dickensian than grounded — this is heightened storybook, not small-town realism.

A Little Princess poster

The Wonder Years1988

An adult narrator looking back on the same collision of first love, friendship, and mortality that defines Vada's summer, stretched across a whole childhood rather than one season.

But Episodic sitcom rhythms mean the emotional weight is spread thin instead of landing all at once.

The Wonder Years poster

Radio Flyer1992no page yet

Another early-90s film trusting a child's-eye view of a summer that's more fraught than it first appears, with a similarly unshowy sense of danger underneath childhood games.

But Its central subject is heavier and darker than My Girl's, and some viewers find its tonal balance shakier.

My Life1993no page yet

Made two years after My Girl, with the same unsparing interest in how ordinary families face death, just from the parent's side of the deathbed instead of the child's.

But Openly a tearjerker from its first scene; there's no comic setup to cushion the blow.

Ponette1996no page yet

Same subject — a child confronting death long before they have language for it — pushed to its most literal, unsentimental extreme, and in another country's cinematic register entirely.

A four-year-old French girl processes her mother's death with an unscripted-feeling honesty that makes My Girl's approach look positively gentle by comparison. Extraordinary, unguarded child performance.

But Subtitled, plotless by American standards, and built entirely around a child's raw grief — genuinely hard to sit through.

Let the Right One In2008

Swap the funeral home for a horror premise and My Girl's central idea — a child's first real friendship shadowed by mortality — reappears almost exactly, just in a genre that lets it turn genuinely frightening.

A friendship between two lonely, misfit kids, one of whom is dying by a different definition of the word. Swedish, wintry, genuinely tender underneath the horror trappings.

But It's a vampire film with real bloodshed — a much colder, stranger world than Vada's Pennsylvania summer.

Let the Right One In poster

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Recommended by

Stand by Me, The Sandlot, Bridge to Terabithia, Fly Away Home, Free Willy, A Monster Calls