Even life’s happiest moments are often tinged with sadness. Here are the 10 best movies to watch when you feel bittersweet.
Ever feel as if you’re supposed to be happy, but there’s a dark cloud hanging around?
You might have had the perfect summer, but it’s about to come to an end. You’re excited to start a new job, or head off to university, or move house, but it means leaving a meaningful era of your life behind. Bittersweet stories are everywhere in cinema because they are especially real; we rarely feel just one thing, but a mixture of things. To feel bittersweet is to let in the push and pull between joy and sorrow, both of which are present in life’s most profound moments. These films capture the feeling perfectly: ranked in no particular order, here are the 10 best movies to watch when you feel bittersweet.
1. The Taste of Things (2023)
Director: Trần Anh Hùng
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel
Hùng was awarded Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this scrumptious love story between a cook (Binoche) and a gourmet (Magimel). Its long opening sequence is a feast for the senses, depicting little else than the sights and smells of a kitchen in full flow. Love is food and food is love in The Taste of Things. A soup’s steam is shot as attentively as a private glance between a husband and wife.
But with love comes loss, and in a film as gentle as this, that loss is shattering. The film depicts grief as the absence of meaning, a distancing from inspiration. For hearts to recover, they must be reignited by a passion so deep it can quieten the sorrow, if only for a little while. There is pain in The Taste of Things and there is hope, and what could be more bittersweet than that?
2. The Quiet Girl (2022)
Director: Colm Bairéad
Starring: Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Catherine Clinch
Bittersweetness is closely related to a sense of longing. It could be for a place or a time or a person. In The Quiet Girl, it’s to be loved. Nine-year-old Cáit (Clinch) goes to stay with distant relatives Eibhlín (Crowley) and Sean (Bennett) for the summer, leaving behind cold, uncaring parents. She’s one of many siblings, timid, and having a hard time at school.
But at Eibhlín and Sean’s farm, she slowly finds somewhere she can let her defences down. The gentle guardianship from her relatives is what’s been missing from her life, and for the first time she is able to just be a young girl, playing, exploring, bonding with loving caregivers. It’s an ever so delicate film, one with a sense of dread hanging over it, brought on by knowing this idyll can’t last forever and Cáit will have to go home when summer ends. But Eibhlín and Sean show her that life won’t always be like it is with her parents, and that hope might just be enough.
3. Old Joy (2006)
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Will Oldham, Daniel London
It is a privilege to grow older, but doing so inevitably means leaving parts of your old self behind. Mark’s (Daniel London) hippy days are long gone and he’s settled with a child on the way, but Kurt (Will Oldham) is still about that life. When Kurt gets back in touch after an extended time apart, the two men in their 30s head to the woods for an overnight camping trip. There’s no friction or animosity, just an awkward elephant in the room that the friendship no longer serves them like it used to.
Reichardt’s quiet cinema is perfectly suited to the unspoken sadness that accompanies the feeling of having grown distant from a friend. Only a few hints of Mark’s former life remain, and one can’t help but wonder how it feels to have grown distant from your old self too. These men will be fine, they are living the lives they want to, but the path they shared has long since split in two, and the film speaks to a truthfulness about growing up and growing apart.
4. La La Land (2016)
Director: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone
Seb (Gosling) and Mia (Stone) are called, like so many are, to the City of Angels to pursue their dreams. Him, a musician. Her, an actor. Their professional struggles are contrasted by their fairytale romance, in which dancing and picture houses and jazz bars bring their relationship and Los Angeles to life. Gosling and Stone are eminently rootable; in La La Land they look every bit the stars their characters long to become.
But the path to success in Hollywood asks a lot of Seb and Mia. Their devotion, time, and attention are split; it’s either their dreams or each other. The film features an emotionally devastating sliding doors sequence, in which we are shown what could have happened if they’d made a different choice. Maybe there is no right or wrong path, and every door opened invariably slams another shut. Maybe there is no happiness without ‘but what if…’
5. Arrival (2016)
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
Who says sci-fi can’t pull on your heart strings? Don’t let the sound of tentacled aliens put you off this profoundly beautiful film by Denis Villeneuve, with Amy Adams playing a linguist, Louise Banks, enlisted to help the military communicate with our extraterrestrial visitors before all hell breaks loose.
There’s a theory that language shapes our worldview (called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) that the film stretches to a poetic degree. In learning an alien language, Banks’ perception of time and space begins to change. Past, present and future converge enabling her to see life anew, providing insight foreign to the human race. In doing so, the film imbues language with a profound sense of wonder and possibility, while also giving Banks the answers to questions she didn’t even know to ask. If the future is already written, and the path ahead contains such happiness and, in Banks’ case, heartache, it takes bravery to continue down that road and face the bittersweet head-on.
6. Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg
Anyone who says ‘don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened’ has never seen Call Me By Your Name. Elio (Chalamet) and his family live somewhere in the north of Italy. Each summer, his professor father invites a grad student to join them and help with his notes. Enter Oliver (Hammer), a strapping and shameless American, whose casual mannerisms, like leaving at a moment’s notice with a carefree ‘later!’, charms and disarms the family.
Elio and Oliver spend the summer together, sharing something that’s hard to put one’s finger on, but it’s a special kind of connection that, as Elio’s father notes, doesn’t happen very often. The hazy Italian sun adds to the paradisiacal dream-like nature of their relationship, a kind of Eden replete with ripe fruit that ends up staining their bedsheets. It’s all too good to last, which might be exactly why it matters all the more.
7. Inside Out (2015)
Director: Pete Docter
Starring: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith
Remember a time before bills, exams, work? Life is simpler as a child. Priorities: make friends and have fun. In Inside Out we meet Riley on the cusp of becoming a teenager. Crucially, we meet her emotions too, made up of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. When Joy and Sadness get lost in the deep recesses of Riley’s subconscious, it sparks a stark coming-of-age moment in the life of a young girl. She loses her impulse control, and other emotions come to the fore that would later become personified in Inside Out 2, such as Anxiety.
What’s bittersweet is the sheer relief Riley feels in giving voice to her worries. When the tears come, when she opens up to her parents, it’s a key moment in her march towards adolescence. She can’t feel joy all of the time, she’s learning. The part of her life where that’s a reasonable goal has passed. But what’s ahead is pretty good too.
8. The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025)
Director: James Griffiths
Starring: Tim Key, Tom Basden, Carey Mulligan
Don’t let The Ballad of Wallis Island’s twee poster and premise do it a disservice. This is a heartfelt, hilarious, and grown-up movie, the latter of which is down to how it handles the bittersweet, unresolved relationships it focuses on. A reclusive superfan, Charles (Key), uses his immense wealth to lure his favourite folk-duo, McGwyver Mortimer (Basden and Mulligan), to the remote island where he stays for a private gig. There’s only one problem: Herb McGwyver and Nell Mortimer are estranged, with the former particularly prickly about the thought of performing old songs together again.
Think you know what happens next? It’s to the film’s credit that it’s not all as simple as that. Tim Key is relentlessly funny, but below Charles’ happy-go-lucky exterior is a grief that won’t ever leave. On paper, this looks like a film that could be tied up in a neat little bow, but despite how much of its runtime is spent smiling, there are simply some parts of life that are beyond repair.
9. The Last Showgirl (2024)
Director: Gia Coppola
Starring: Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista
Shelley is devastated. The revue she’s been part of for decades on the Las Vegas strip is to close. This life is all she’s known, and she’s sacrificed so much to be part of it, including a relationship with her daughter. What’s next for a showgirl in her 50s?
The Last Showgirl makes for a perfect double-bill with The Wrestler, but the former has more of a dreamlike quality to it. Shelley romanticises her life’s work, she traces its lineage back to the Belle Époque and feels part of an ongoing legend. But she’s clinging to a time that no longer exists, when she was younger and people were paying to see her show. Despite being nearer the bottom than the top, she wouldn’t have it any other way, just so long as she can perform. The film feels like a fading polaroid, an ode to a way of life that’s disappearing, and Shelley holds on to it for as long as she can.
10. Christopher Robin (2018)
Director: Marc Foster
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell
The good news is Christopher Robin ends happily, but it’s a heck of a journey to get there. Christopher Robin of Winnie the Pooh fame has grown up and forgotten all about his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood. The harsh realities of life have set in: he’s served in the British army, and at work he’s tasked with firing employees. He’s not a good father or husband and the light has gone from his life.
Thankfully, Pooh and the gang set out to find Christopher Robin and remind him what life’s all about. But the majority of the film is a warning about the perils of growing up and what is often jettisoned along the way. If one is not careful, all sense of whimsy is lost, no time is made for play, and before long a general miserableness sets in. The film advocates for taking the time to centre joy in life by showing just how easy it is to neglect it. It’s a cautionary tale that says you can’t get lost time back, but it’s never too late to put something right.