3 Movies Like 3 Women (1977)

Staff & contributors

Chasing the feel of watching 3 Women ? Here are the movies we recommend you watch right after.

Robert Altman’s 3 Women begins normally—it follows the flirtatious Millie, the childlike Pinky, and the silent Willie, all of whom seem to represent different phases of womanhood. Their interactions are mundane but relatable, but then the film takes a turn for the surreal. Mysterious people show up. Personalities are exchanged. Questions are never resolved. As in a dream, the lack of logic in 3 Women makes sense: you follow the women and the strange things happening around them because it feels imperative and significant. This is the kind of film that will inspire endless debate and discussions once the credits roll in. Alternatively, it could leave you stunned, already trying to remember what just happened as if you’ve just woken up.

Often considered Claire Denis’ best film, Beau Travail is an epic exploration of both masculinity and colonialism. Inspired by Melville’s Billy Budd, she transplants the story to Djibouti where the French Foreign Legion run seemingly aimless drills in an arid desert landscape while largely alienated from the local community.Denis inverts the male gaze and imbues charged eroticism to the bodies in motion as the men train and wrestle. Accompanied by the music of Britten’s Billy Budd opera, these movements transform into a breathtaking modern dance. Underneath her jaw-dropping direction is a cutting allegory on repression, desire, and violence, working on both the individual and geopolitical level. This incredible tale is capped off by one of the best end credit sequences of all time.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Adiatou Massudi, Bernardo Montet, Dan Herzberg, Denis Lavant, Gianfranco Poddighe, Giuseppe Molino, Grégoire Colin, Marc Veh, Michel Subor, Mickael Ravovski, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Richard Courcet

Director: Claire Denis

Rating: Unrated

Sometimes, all you need to make a good movie is to get two vastly different characters and force them to stay together. It’s probably why Kiss of the Spider Woman was made in the first place– the novel dumps hardened, self-sacrificial activist Valentin and flamboyant gay man Molina in a jail cell. But rather than depict Molina and Valentin just talking, the film visually recreates the stories they tell to each other as films-within-a-film. Molina’s fictional love stories are given all the glamor and drama of classic 60s romances, and Valentin’s life story depicted with a straightforward, gritty realism that matches the hard experiences he had. So as they tell their stories and challenge each other with their respective approaches to life, director Héctor Babenco ensures that as the two finally feel heard by each other, the audience, too, can easily empathize with the perspectives they take. It also ensures that the plot twist holds a strong punch. Though its escapist approach may suggest otherwise, Kiss of the Spider Woman realistically explores the way storytelling has always meant freedom.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Ana Maria Braga, Denise Dumont, Herson Capri, José Lewgoy, Lineu Dias, Luis Roberto Galizia, Miguel Falabella, Milton Gonçalves, Miriam Pires, Nildo Parente, Nuno Leal Maia, Patricio Bisso, Raúl Juliá, Sônia Braga, William Hurt

Director: Héctor Babenco

Rating: R

Already featuring some of the desperation and melancholy that would go on to characterize most of his work, Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight manages to draw palpable suspense and drama out of, essentially, three characters and a couple of seedy locations. We learn perhaps too little about these characters and why this veteran gambler is drawn to a young homeless man, but there's also something intriguing about how Anderson suggests much larger and much crueler stories going on just out of sight. It truly feels like these people are just trying to hold on to the smallest things that ease their pain—which works because of incredibly compelling work from Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, and a young Gwyneth Paltrow already at the top of her game.

Genre: Crime, Drama

Actor: Ernie Anderson, F. William Parker, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jake Cross, John C. Reilly, Kathleen Campbell, Melora Walters, Nathanael Cooper, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Renee Breen, Richard Gross, Robert Ridgely, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendy Weidman, Wynn White

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson