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How can a person with the title “Screens Critic” contribute to a department-wide package called “Divorce Week?” From the sofa, naturally, watching approximately 54 hours of people breaking up, with believable emotions but slightly sassier best friends than mortals have in real life. Hollywood has had a lot to say about the meet-cute, but it also has a fair amount to say about the split-up. Do you want to laugh? Rage? Laugh and rage in subtitles? Just watch a lot of Meryl Streep?
A caveat: what we’re not doing here is featuring “Eat, Pray, Groove with Stella Under the Tuscan Sun.” Nothing against those movies (okay, only some things against those movies), but they already appear on every relationship-centric best-of list. And they’re not about divorce so much as they’re about the hard work of putting yourself back together under any circumstances in which life has knocked you in the teeth. At least, any circumstances in which you look like Diane Lane and your travel budget is infinite.
Most marriages don’t end with Tuscan Suns. But they also don’t all end with bitterness and despair. In these movies and TV shows, they might end quietly, or dramatically, or quirkily, or with steely resolve, or with a lit match taken to your spouse’s luxury car.
Another caveat: while this list has some of everything, it doesn’t have all of everything. I can already hear some of you complaining about the omission of “The War of the Roses.” Of “Grace and Frankie.” Of a show called, literally, “Divorce.” But y’all, I did what I felt was right. And with 29 movies and TV shows, this list is representative. It has comedy, drama, highbrow, low — and it represents every phase from the moment you realize it’s over to the whole long life you live on the other side.
All of these are streaming online, but some of them might require a paid rental.
“An American Family,” Episode 9, 1973 | When filmmakers moved in with the Loud family, long before reality TV was a thing, they expected to capture the ordinary ongoings of a happy upper-middle-class American household. Instead they found themselves in uncharted territory when matriarch Pat asked her husband, Bill, for a divorce on air. “You know there’s a problem,” she said in Episode 9, handing him the card of an attorney as he returns home from a business trip. “What’s your problem?” Bill asks in return.
Hollywood was still tiptoeing around how to deal with divorce on the screen, and then suddenly here we were in a real couple’s living room, learning that nobody really knows what’s happening in a relationship except the two people in it.
“Waiting to Exhale,” 1995 | This scorned-women popcorn flick lives and dies with the only scene you remember: Angela Bassett dousing her ex’s BMW with lighter fluid. But when the movie came out, what made it truly revelatory was the no-holds-barred look at the intimate lives of four friends in various stages of romantic mess. The Wendell Pierce cameo is particularly … explosive.
“Sex and the City” Season 3, Episode 10, 2000 | “Sex and the City’s” resident romantic Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) doesn’t actually split with Trey for two more seasons; in “All or Nothing,” she’s not even married yet. But her decision to negotiate a prenup to the man she thinks is the love of her life is the moment Charlotte accepts that not all weddings end with happily-ever-after. She, like all of us, must consider the nuts and bolts of marriage, not just the hearts and flowers. Charlotte still allows herself to jump into the union, but with a financial parachute that became a meme: “I’m worth a million.”
And a few years later in Season 5, Episode 6 when the marriage to Trey does end, Charlotte meets her next great love, Harry, because she hires him as her divorce lawyer. Sometimes endings can lead to beginnings.
“Divorce Iranian Style,” 1998 | This grainy, cinema vérité documentary parks itself in an Iranian divorce court and invites the viewer to follow along as real disbanding couples try to end marriages in a religiously informed legal system that does not want them to. “Divorce Iranian Style” is now almost 30 years old; follow up your viewing with “A Separation,” a 2011 Oscar-winning feature film that also explores divorce in Iran, fictionalized and nearly 15 years later.
“Crazy, Stupid, Love,” 2011 | This was almost eliminated from consideration because — spoiler alert — the couple ends up back together in the end. But divorce movies are overwhelmingly told from the female perspective, and this one refreshingly chronicles Cal’s (Steve Carell) journey to rediscovering himself after his wife (Julianne Moore) says she wants out. Bonus: as a side plot, we get the first romantic pairing of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, a full five years before “La La Land.” See also: “Is This Thing On,” 2025, in which Will Arnett winningly tries a separation from Laura Dern.
“The First Wives Club,” 1996 | Sometimes divorce is actually just an amazing blessing.
“The Other Woman,” 2014 | Amazing.
“An Unmarried Woman,” 1978 | Seriously, amazing.
“Blue Valentine,” 2010, and “Marriage Story,” 2019 | These are great movies. They’re also so sad I can barely bring myself to tell you to watch them.
Here’s what you’re gonna do. Wait for a night when you need a good cry. Go to the store and buy all the snacks for your solo watch party. Watch “Blue Valentine” and/or “Marriage Story” and then immediately — and this is important — IMMEDIATELY follow these viewings up with “Under the Tuscan Sun,” 2003. Just this one time. I give you dispensation.
“Kate & Allie,” Season 2, Episode 9, 1984 | “Over the long haul, if there were two people in your life you really loved, one who held your head when you were sick and gave you aspirin and chicken soup and was there all the time, and another who came by once in awhile and brought a Ferrari, which one would you love? Forget I said that.”
Forty years after its run, nearly every episode of “Kate & Allie”— about two divorced friends who move their kids into one New York brownstone — completely holds up. But start with “Country Dog,” in which co-parenting alongside a wealthier ex slowly drives Allie (Jane Curtin) insane.
Choose Your Own Tyler Perry | When I crowdsourced suggestions for this package, nobody suggested the same Tyler Perry, but everyone suggested a Tyler Perry. “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” 2005, i.e. Perry’s introduction of the Madea cinematic universe? “Why Did I Get Married?” 2007, with a powerhouse cast, a sequel and a television spin-off? “Divorce in the Black,” 2024, which opens with the most bananas funeral scene you’ve ever witnessed? Or maybe you want to settle in for episodic camp, in the form of his ongoing TV show, “Divorced Sistas.”
Nobody is going to mistake Perry’s oeuvre for high art. But if you want high drama, high emotion and high raunch, nobody is better than Perry at letting his characters feel what you feel and behave as you would never dare. Subtlety is overrated.
“Our Son,” 2023 | The catalogue of movies featuring same-sex divorce isn’t as deep as it could be, but “Our Son” covers a lot of bases. I dare anyone to remain unmoved during the scene in which Gabriel (Billy Porter) retells his son the story of his birth — an affectionate saga including a wish, an egg donor and a surrogate who made sure to eat lots of celery and chocolate chip cookies.
“The L Word” Seasons 1ish-3ish; “The L Word: Generation Q” Season 3 | On the other hand, if what you want is a queer divorce storyline that is less about being tender and more about being preposterously sexy, you can hunker down and enjoy the bonkers shenanigans of Bette and Tina.
“Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem,” 2014 | The divorce in this delicate Israeli film was 10 years in the making. We were first introduced to the unhappy union of Viviane and Elisha in 2004’s “To Take a Wife,” and followed up with them in 2008’s “Shiva.” In “Gett,” Viviane has come to beg a panel of judges to release her from the union, but it requires the agreement of her husband, who won’t let her go. What would have been a good movie on its own becomes a sublime one when you watch the first two in the trilogy, witnessing the fine lines, gray hairs and exhaustion appearing on the faces of two people who never should have been together in the first place.
The Jesse Eisenberg Double Feature | “The Squid and the Whale,” 2005, is a quirky, indie coming-of-age movie, unless you’re considering it as a parent, in which case maybe it’s a horror flick? This story of a very literary divorce — Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney both play novelists — is told through the eyes of their two sons, played by Owen Kline and Eisenberg. It’s a sobering reminder that kids are freakishly perceptive to the foibles of their moms and dads and we should all pencil in therapy sessions until the end of time. “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” 2022, is another welcome look at divorce from a male perspective. All grown up, Eisenberg plays a wry, acerbic New York doctor navigating his career choices, single fatherhood, and the delicious, hellacious casual sex now available on the dating apps that became standard while he was busy being married to Rachel (Claire Danes).
The Meryl Streep Trifecta | What kind of divorce are you having? The kind where two good people felt trapped by rigid gender roles? The kind where your spouse is a serial philanderer? The kind where years pass and you start to wonder whether you should have stuck out the marriage? Meryl Streep’s characters have seen it all.
In 1979’s “Kramer vs. Kramer,” she’s a housewife who finds her stay-at-home role too stifling to bear (Dustin Hoffman plays her husband, similarly swallowed by his career). 1986’s “Heartburn” is worth watching just for the scene where she pieces together clues of her husband’s (Jack Nicholson) affair in the middle of a bad haircut. And when she rekindles things with her ex (Alec Baldwin) in 2009’s “It’s Complicated,” you don’t exactly think these two should get back together — but it is a good reminder that, if you’ve got kids, you’re going to be around your dongle of an ex for a long, long time.
“Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce),” 2021 | Look, sometimes divorce is just a hot mess, and this Korean melodrama leans into it. Everyone is cheating. Everyone is having someone else’s baby. Everyone is thinking their 31-year relationship is great until everyone’s husband announces he just doesn’t want to do this anymore. The cultural mores around divorce and marriage are subtly different in South Korea – which becomes its own fascinating reason to watch– but rest assured that dumpster fire transcends subtitles.
Start with Episode 1: you’ll need the rudimentaries to keep up with the sprawling cast.
“Celeste & Jesse Forever,” 2012 | An underrated gem, this two-hander co-stars Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg as high school sweethearts and best friends whose separation is so seamless that even their social circle can’t tell whether they actually broke up. What’s lovely about this movie is that there are no villains. Celeste and Jesse just want different things from a lifelong partnership – and ideally, they want to look for those things with other people while trying not to lose their affection for each other. The beginning of “Celeste & Jesse” is funny, the ending is bittersweet, and the whole movie is a reminder that love doesn’t end just because a marriage does.
“Eat Pray Love,” 2010 | My editor insisted. Fine.
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