Best movies for Valentine’s Day: Watch these films about the greatest loves of our lives

On this most sacred of holidays – Valentine’s Day – it’s worth recognising the value of the relationships that last a lifetime.

They’re the ones that are always there for you, for a fun drinking session or to help pick up the pieces when the world is being such a dick. But it’s not your husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend or partner, it’s your mate.

Lovers come and go, sometimes in bruising fashion, but your true friends are forever. It’s not always smooth sailing, but the shared memories and deep emotional connections we have with our besties trump capricious paramours.

You don’t even need commercially driven “holidays” to affirm and prove the bonds of your friendship.

So, on this day, February 14, we salute the stories that celebrate our friends.

SIDEWAYS

You know you’re a good friend when you listen to them endlessly drone on about the acidity, tannins and the bouquet of wine. Here’s a tip for wine lovers, most people just want to drink it, and comes down to “tastes good!” and “tastes bad!”.

Sideways did make oenophile seems at least semi-interesting and its release was credited for both a surge in pinot noir and a massive drop in merlot sales.

Beautifully written and performed, the friendship between the fussy Miles and the freewheeling Jack is a portrait of male friendship without judgement.

THELMA AND LOUISE

Obviously, Thelma and Louise is a massive “don’t try this at home, kids” kind of thing, but you really have to applaud its depiction of a ride-or-die friendship. Or, in its case, ride-and-die.

It’s a sassy classic that also points to the too-familiar predicaments faced by many women (coercive relationships, attempted rape and knowing no one would believe them). Thelma and Louise has endured because its female audience understands why they make the choices they make.

Through it all, even if there’s an off-ramp for one, they keep going together.

FIRST WIVES CLUB

When three college friends reunite after the death of the fourth member of the previously tight clique, it’s a raucous mix. All three have been left by their husbands for a younger woman, and they’re bent on revenge.

At first, they’re united by a common goal but as the film progresses, they recognise that what really holds them together are each other, despite their differences. It doesn’t hurt to make their no-good exes pay either.

Bette Midler, Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn are transcendent in this comedy, and as Ivana Trump told them, “Don’t get mad, get everything”.

STAND BY ME

There’s nothing that will bond friends like an unsupervised quest to find a dead body while carrying the gun pilfered from someone’s dad. Remember how kids used to go out and play by themselves? The good old days!

Seriously though, the four mates really go through something together and have seen each other at their most vulnerable at a formative time. Gordie reflects later that you never have friends later on like the ones you had at 12, and there’s truth to that.

It’s a special moment, when you first discover independence from your parents but haven’t put up the shields that come with teenage angst and cynical adulthood. At that age, your friends are everything.

WAITING TO EXHALE

Starring Angela Bassett, Whitney Houston, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon, it might seem as if Waiting to Exhale is about four women trying to sort out their tumultuous love lives. One has a string of failed relationships, another’s husband leaves her for someone else after she sacrificed her career to support him.

But what we know to be true is that no matter what is going in those aspects of their lives, as long as they have the support of each other, they’re going to be OK. When the dudes are being silly, your girlfriends will pick you up.

BRIDESMAIDS

Bridesmaids might now be best remembered for the pooping in the street scene, that Wilson Phillips sequence or the sight of Melissa McCarthy with all those pups, but there is an insightful story here about friendships.

At its heart is what happens when one friend feels left behind by the other, when they don’t feel as if things are equal between them (in this case, an economic disparity). It’s a potent reminder that friendships need maintenance, just like every relationship and that we should never take it for granted.

BEACHES

Ooph, this one is a proper weepy, and a fantastic choice if you’re feeling a bit emotionally constipated and need a moment of catharsis.

The brash and exuberant CC met the proper and polite Hillary when they’re kids, under the boardwalk in Atlantic City. While they come from different worlds and are very different people, the two form an inseparable bond.

They might fight, be jealous, become exasperated, and disagree with each other’s choices, but they’ll always come back together, especially when times are hard. For CC and Hillary, no matter the current husband or boyfriend, they’ll always be the great love of their lives. They are, you could say, the wind beneath their wings.

FRIDAY

A comedy of errors where a bunch of mishaps and bumbles blow the stakes up much higher than it would be, Friday is such a fun hang-out movie, and just not just because it immortalised the now famous line, “Bye, Felisha!”.

Starring Ice Cube and Chris Tucker, in his break-out role, the two play friends Craig and Smokey, who need to come up with $200 to pay back a drug dealer for a stash of pot they weren’t meant to blaze, which is much, much harder than it sounds.

BOOKSMART

Molly and Amy are two smart girls who have worked all through high school to get into the universities of their dreams only to discover, on graduation day, that their hard-partying classmates, the ones they had so much contempt for, did the same - and got to have a life.

Realising they’d missed out on some crucial teenage milestones, they set out to have a grand night.

Directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever, it’s a crackling comedy with a believable friendship of two girls who have created this us-versus-them bubble and how it fares when they discover the world is bigger than the cage they built for themselves.

BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Padraic and Colm are two lifelong friends who meet at the lone pub in their small Irish village every day for a drink. Then one day, Colm freezes Padraic out. The younger man is not the smartest kid in class and can’t understand why he’s being blanked, and Colm offers nothing more than his former friend is too dull.

It escalates into a bizarre feud and if you think it makes no sense why they would fall out, Martin McDonagh’s sharply funny and tragic film is really a metaphor for the Irish Civil War.

SUPERBAD

Set over a night where two soon-to-be high school graduates try to lose their virginity, Superbad is a raucous ride in the grand tradition of coming-of-age party movies. It’s also an interesting portrayal of two friends where one seems to be more imposing of the two but you realise that each contribute different things to the dynamic.

Most movies centred on friendship will have a point where a conflict will cause a rift between the two leads. In Superbad, which is loosely based on Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s real-life friendship, it pushes the characters to air out some of the frustrations that had about each other they haven’t been game enough to voice. Honesty is a great thing.

TOY STORY

It has a song literally called “You Have a Friend in Me”, so the themes of Toy Story are pretty clear.

We forget now because Pixar has had such a bonkers three decades with dozens of superb films but when Toy Story was released in 1995, it was truly groundbreaking for both its animation and the quality of its writing.

It was such a simple but sophisticated story in that it wasn’t just about toys who came alive when the humans were out of the room, but how a newcomer disrupts the dynamic of an existing group of friends. Even though Buzz didn’t fit in at first, they’ll still go to bat for him.

ROMY AND MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

The friends who lie together, stay together. Especially when it’s something relatively innocuous like telling a bunch of stuck-up former schoolmates that you’re successful businesswomen who invented Post-Its. Look, it was a pre-Google era when such things weren’t so easily debunked on the spot.

If Romy and Michele were going to triumph for their inventive style, positive attitude and can-do spirit – plus, excellent taste in music – then they’ll do it together. Bring on the sequel!

ANOTHER ROUND

As soon as Danish film Another Round proved to be an international hit, the Americans swooped in to buy the rights for an English-language remake (with Leonardo DiCaprio attached, no less) but the original needs no imitation.

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg and starring Mads Mikkelsen, Another Round is about four friends who all work at a school in Copenhagen. Each have their personal challenges, and apparently the solution to that is to devise an experiment to see if they can be more relaxed and operate at a higher level with a sustained blood alcohol level of 0.05 per cent.

JOY RIDE

Directed by Crazy Rich Asians writer Adele Lim, the story is about four American friends who road trip through China while trying to reunite with one of the group’s birth mother.

Wild and effervescent, Joy Ride has been tagged as the “female Hangover” which is a helpful but reductive shorthand. It has a level of emotional depth The Hangover didn’t quite hit, while also actually going further than the 2009 movie.

While most of group in The Hangover didn’t know they’d taken drugs, the girls in Joy Ride were all-in on one hell of a cocaine bender. Also, there are some very horny and funny sex scenes.