Galentine’s Day watchlist: Films that celebrate female friendship

How much romance do we actually need? Cinema would have you believe it is the point of everything. It gets the sweeping arcs, the soundtracks, the close-ups. Friendship, especially between women, is treated like background architecture. Necessary, but never central.

But most of us know that is not how it works. It is our girlfriends who sit through the bad dates, the spirals, the job rejections and the random meltdowns about, well, life. Men get an entire genre to honour that kind of bond—the buddy movie. Women get subplots, quirks, and token best friends who exist to listen.

This Galentine’s Day, let’s look at films that refuse that erasure. Films that pass the Bechdel Test not because they are trying to make a point, but because centring women’s inner lives should be the baseline. These are stories where friendship is not a placeholder for romance, but the emotional engine. It is time men stop being the default centre of our stories, and our emotional worlds.

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Linda Linda Linda

Set in a Japanese high school ahead of a cultural festival, the film follows three girls whose band loses its lead vocalist. They recruit a Korean exchange student and race to rehearse a set of punk covers in time for the show. The story unfolds through rehearsals, awkwardness, music and shared nerves. There are no dramatic betrayals or artificial stakes. It rules that the film’s primary obstacle is the girls being slightly sleepy.

The film captures the particular intensity of youth, when your friends feel like your entire world. Its innocence is not naive or forced, but a natural consequence of telling a small, sincere story about becoming. Every frame feels patient and considered. It draws you in gently and leaves you thinking about the girls who shaped you when you needed them most. The dream sequence tips it into something quietly transcendent.

This is the cinematic equivalent of a group hug from your girlfriends.

Frances Ha

Frances Ha follows Frances, a 27-year-old aspiring dancer in New York who does not quite have an apartment, a steady job or even a plan. When her best friend Sophie moves out to live with someone else, Frances is forced into a series of temporary living situations and uncertain choices.

For women in their twenties, especially those moving through big cities and bigger feelings, the film lands softly but firmly. It understands the particular loneliness of abundance. being surrounded by people and possibility, and still feeling unmoored.

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At one point, Frances describes the kind of love she believes in, catching someone’s eye across a room and knowing “that is your person in this life.” You assume she is talking about a romantic partner. She isn’t. She means Sophie. The film centres that love, not any fleeting relationship with a man, and never treats it as lesser for being platonic.

It recognises something cinema often overlooks: that losing proximity to a friend can feel just as seismic as heartbreak.

Bottoms

A queer high school comedy that escalates quickly: fight clubs, social hierarchies and absurd violence, all played with complete deadpan commitment. Bottoms leans into exaggeration, but its emotional core is simple: two friends clinging to each other as they attempt reinvention.

PJ and Josie are messy, delusional and deeply unserious about almost everything, except the aching desire to be wanted. The world around them is heightened to the point of nonsense, yet their friendship anchors it. It is selfish, co-dependent and occasionally misguided, but the film grants them complexity without punishment.

Bottoms works because their bond is not framed as preparation for romance. It is the engine of the story. The teen movie has always been elastic, but here it is stretched until it snaps and reforms into something queerer and far more fun.

It is chaotic, but the commitment (to the bit and to each other) holds.

The First Wives Club

The First Wives Club starts with betrayal — three college friends dumped by their husbands for younger women — but it is far more satisfying than a revenge fantasy.

Annie, Brenda and Elise are not saints. They are dramatic, petty, insecure and occasionally ridiculous. The film lets them be all of that. What resurfaces, slowly, is the friendship that existed long before the marriages did,  a shared history that feels sturdier than the men who discarded them. The revenge is fun (and very camp), but the real pleasure is watching them find their footing again in each other’s company.

It is glossy and theatrical and unmistakably 90s. But beneath the sequins is something steady: the reminder that women do not expire when men decide they do, and that sometimes the only thing more reliable than romance is the friend who knew you before it.

Bend It Like Beckham

A sports comedy on the surface, but for so many of us, it became something closer to a cultural landmark. Jess, a football-obsessed teenager from a Punjabi Sikh family in West London, is caught between expectation and ambition, between dutiful daughter and something freer.

At its centre is her bond with Jules, from teammates to rivals to more. Their connection carries a tenderness the film never quite names. It lingers in shared bedrooms, jealous glances, the kind of intensity that feels bigger than friendship and yet safely contained within it.

What makes the film endure is not just that Jess gets to chase her dream, but that the football pitch becomes a space of possibility, away from family surveillance and cultural anxiety. For a generation of brown girls, it quietly suggested that desire — for sport, for independence, maybe even for each other — did not have to cancel out belonging.

It is warm, funny, occasionally messy and deeply beloved. A cult classic for a reason.

Happy Galentine’s Day. Press play with the girls who know you best. The great love stories were never just romantic anyway.