Movies About Brothers and Sisters

The template for every "Dad always liked you best" argument. James Dean's Cal is the restless son, Richard Davalos's Aron the good one, and Elia Kazan stages their contest for a cold father's approval as a Cain and Abel story set in the Salinas Valley around World War I. Dean plays jealousy as a physical ache, all hunched shoulders and sudden grins, and the film never pretends the favored brother has it easy either. Heavy, operatic and still raw seven decades on.

Sibling rivalry at its most gothic. Bette Davis plays Jane Hudson, a former vaudeville child star gone sour, and Joan Crawford is Blanche, the sister whose film career eclipsed hers and who now depends on Jane from a wheelchair in their decaying Hollywood mansion. Robert Aldrich lets decades of resentment curdle into horror. Davis earned her tenth and final Best Actress nomination, and casting two famous rivals as the sisters gives every exchange an extra edge. Camp, cruel and genuinely unsettling; pick it to watch jealousy go all the way.

Three adult sisters, two Thanksgivings and a great deal of quiet resentment. Mia Farrow's Hannah is the capable one everyone leans on, which is exactly why Dianne Wiest's flailing Holly and Barbara Hershey's restless Lee find her so hard to forgive. Woody Allen keeps the tone light enough for laughs, yet the scenes where the sisters finally say what they think land hard. Wiest and Michael Caine both won supporting Oscars, and Allen won for the screenplay. Funny, wise and best watched with someone who has sisters of their own.

A cross-country drive with a brother you never knew you had. Tom Cruise's Charlie starts out wanting only his share of the inheritance; Dustin Hoffman's Raymond wants Judge Wapner on at five o'clock. What changes between them is small, slow and earned, which is why it still works. It won Best Picture, Best Director for Barry Levinson and Hoffman's second Best Actor Oscar. Its portrait of autism is a product of 1988 and has dated, but the shift from transaction to tenderness between the brothers has not.

The most devastating sibling film ever animated, and not one for a casual evening. Seita, fourteen, tries to keep his little sister Setsuko alive after the 1945 firebombing of Kobe, and every small kindness he manages, a tin of fruit drops or a jar of fireflies, is shadowed by what he cannot provide. Isao Takahata's Studio Ghibli film adapts Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical story, drawn from his own sister's death. Watch it when you are ready to be wrecked, then call your siblings.

For anyone who has loved a sibling they could not save. Robert Redford's Montana film follows the minister's sons, steady Norman (Craig Sheffer) and gifted, reckless Paul (Brad Pitt), whose shared language is fly fishing on the Big Blackfoot River. The fly-casting scenes are gorgeous, but the real subject is the gap between brothers who understand each other completely and still cannot reach each other. Gentle, elegiac and quietly sad rather than melodramatic.

The eldest sibling's movie. Johnny Depp's Gilbert holds his small Iowa family together, and his chief duty is minding his younger brother Arnie, played by a startlingly committed teenage Leonardo DiCaprio, who climbs the town water tower whenever no one is looking. Lasse Hallström finds plenty of warmth and humor in the exhaustion, and the film is honest that love and resentment can sit in the same chest. Bittersweet rather than bleak.

A pair of worn sneakers shared between a brother and sister in Tehran, and somehow it plays like a thriller. Ali loses Zahra's only shoes, and rather than tell their struggling parents, the two swap his pair between morning and afternoon school shifts, sprinting through alleys to make the handover. Majid Majidi's film became the first from Iran nominated for the foreign-language Oscar. It is gentle, funny and tense in equal parts, and one of the few films here that suits a family movie night with older kids.

The best film there is about the sibling who stayed home and the one who drifted. Laura Linney's Sammy, a single mother in a small Catskills town, is thrilled and then exasperated when her unreliable brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) turns up needing money and a place to land. Kenneth Lonergan's debut as director never pushes for big scenes; it lets two orphaned adults fall back into the roles they have played since childhood, protector and problem, and finds both comedy and ache in it. Talky, humane and endlessly rewatchable.

The 2002 animated original, with the alien on the poster and the sisters at the heart. Nani, barely an adult, is raising her little sister Lilo after their parents' deaths, juggling jobs while a social worker watches for any excuse to separate them. Their fights are loud, petty and completely believable, and their reconciliations are why the word ohana still means something to a generation of viewers. Big laughs, a few real tears, and fine for all ages.

Three grown brothers who have not spoken in a year board a train across India for a "spiritual journey" one of them has scheduled down to the minute. Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman bicker over painkillers, their late father's luggage and who gets to be the favorite, which is every sibling vacation ever. Wes Anderson's usual deadpan comedy has a grief-stricken core here, and the literal baggage becomes a pretty good joke about the emotional kind. Funny first, quietly moving by the end.

What happens when two middle-aged siblings who have kept their distance have to care for the father who made them that way. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play Wendy and Jon, a struggling playwright and a theater professor, who are forced to find their father a nursing home and, in the process, each other. Tamara Jenkins writes the arguments over nursing-home brochures with uncomfortable precision and dry wit. Essential viewing for anyone splitting a parent's care with a brother or sister; expect laughs that catch in the throat.

The pure-comedy option, and a surprisingly accurate study of sibling rivalry once you strip away the bunk beds. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play grown men still living with their parents who become stepbrothers when those parents marry, and they fight like eight-year-olds over drum kits and bedrooms before uniting against a smug younger brother. Adam McKay lets the pair improvise freely, so it is crude, loud and very quotable. Pick it when the evening calls for nothing heavier than laughing at how siblings act.

A wedding weekend seen through the eyes of the sister nobody wanted to seat near the microphone. Anne Hathaway's Kym comes home from rehab for her sister Rachel's wedding (Rosemarie DeWitt), and old guilt over a family tragedy leaks into every toast and rehearsal dinner. Jonathan Demme shoots it like a home video, loose and crowded with music, which makes the fights feel overheard rather than staged. Uncomfortable, often very funny and ultimately generous to both sisters.

A boxing movie where the real opponent is the big brother in your corner. Mark Wahlberg's Micky Ward is a quiet Lowell fighter; Christian Bale's Dicky Eklund, his older half-brother and trainer, is a fading local hero with a drug habit and an endless supply of charm. Bale and Melissa Leo, as their formidable mother, both won supporting Oscars, and the family scenes, with a chorus of sisters on the couch, are more bruising than the bouts. Loud, funny and rousing, based on the real brothers.

The 2011 MMA drama, built for anyone who has ever wanted to fight their brother and hug him in the same breath. Tom Hardy's Tommy, a former Marine, and Joel Edgerton's Brendan, a physics teacher, are estranged brothers who enter the same tournament for very different reasons, while Nick Nolte, Oscar-nominated as their recovering alcoholic father, tries to make amends to both. Gavin O'Connor plays the formula straight and earns every cliche. Emotionally heavy, with an ending that leaves grown adults in pieces.

An end-of-the-world movie that is really about two sisters who cannot help each other in the same way. In the first half, Kirsten Dunst's Justine falls apart at her own lavish wedding while Charlotte Gainsbourg's Claire tries to hold the evening together; in the second, as a rogue planet approaches, their roles reverse. Dunst won Best Actress at Cannes for Lars von Trier's film, and its portrait of depression, and of the sibling stuck managing it, is unusually clear-eyed. Slow, beautiful and heavy. Not a Friday-night pick.

The 2013 animated original, a Disney princess film that turns out to be about a sister knocking on a closed bedroom door for years. Anna (Kristen Bell) keeps reaching out; Elsa (Idina Menzel) keeps shutting her out to protect her, and the story's big act of true love is, pointedly, between the two of them. It won the Oscars for Best Animated Feature and for "Let It Go." Lighter than most picks here and fine for any age, though the snowman jokes are aimed at the younger end.

Estranged twins, yes, but nobody swaps places here: this is about two adults who know exactly where the other's bruises are. Bill Hader's Milo and Kristen Wiig's Maggie reunite after both have hit bottom, and in a small New York town they rediscover the private humor that got them through childhood. The lip-sync to "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" is the scene people remember, but Hader and Wiig are just as good in the dramatic stretches. Note that suicide attempts frame the story; funny, sad and very tender.

A heist movie that runs on brotherly devotion. Chris Pine's Toby, a divorced father, and Ben Foster's Tanner, his volatile ex-con older brother, rob small West Texas bank branches to save the family's ranch, while Jeff Bridges's ranger closes in. Taylor Sheridan's script, nominated for an Oscar along with the film itself, gives the brothers long, easy stretches of teasing between the robberies, so you understand why Tanner would do anything for Toby. Tense, darkly funny and sadder than it first appears.

One very long night of a brother making everything worse while trying to help. After a bank robbery goes wrong, Robert Pattinson's Connie scrambles across Queens to free his younger brother Nick, who has a developmental disability and is now in police custody, played with real tenderness by co-director Benny Safdie. The Safdie brothers keep the camera tight and the synth score pounding, so it plays like a panic attack. It is a sharp, unsentimental look at a sibling whose love is real and also the problem. Intense, grimy and not remotely cozy.

Greta Gerwig's 2019 version, the most alive the March sisters have ever been on screen. Saoirse Ronan's Jo, Emma Watson's Meg, Florence Pugh's Amy and Eliza Scanlen's Beth talk over each other, borrow each other's clothes and, in Amy's case, burn Jo's manuscript, and the shuffled timeline sets their childhood closeness against what adulthood does to it. Pugh's Amy, finally given her side of the rivalry with Jo, is the revelation. Warm and joyful for long stretches, with one stretch of grief that hits as hard as it should.

Mike Leigh's 2024 drama about a woman furious at the whole world, and the younger sister who is the only person she still lets near her. Marianne Jean-Baptiste's Pansy berates her husband, her son and every stranger in London; Michele Austin's warm, chatty Chantelle keeps showing up anyway. Jean-Baptiste's performance is ferocious and often startlingly funny, but the scenes between the sisters are where the film finds its heart. Short on plot and heavy in mood; a strong pick for anyone who has loved a difficult sibling without being able to fix them.

The newest film here, and a reminder that sisters are often the only witnesses to how a family really worked. Renate Reinsve's Nora, a stage actress, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas's Agnes reunite with their estranged father, a once-celebrated director played by Stellan Skarsgård, who wants Nora for his comeback film. Their quiet alliance against his charm is what holds the story together. Joachim Trier's drama won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2025, the first Norwegian film to do so, and went on to win the Oscar for Best International Feature in March 2026, Norway's first in that category. Reflective, wry and deeply moving rather than bleak.