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Best Male friendship Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of male friendship cinema — measured across 2,492 indexed frames from 37 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Male friendship films over-index on teenager, cowboy hat and horse — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Paranoid Park (2007)

    Gus Van SantDP Christopher DoyleIMDb 6.6TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    The teenager and skateboarder Alex is interviewed by Detective Richard Lu that is investigating the death of a security guard in the rail yards severed by a train who was apparently hit by a skate board. While dealing with the separation process of his parents and the sexual heat of his virgin girlfriend Jennifer, Alex writes his last experiences in Paranoid Park with his new acquaintances and how the guard was killed, trying to relieve his feeling of guilty from his conscience.

  2. 2

    Close (2022)

    Lukas DhontDP Frank van den EedenIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    The intense friendship between two thirteen-year old boys Leo and Remi suddenly gets disrupted. Struggling to understand what has happened, Léo approaches Sophie, Rémi's mother. "Close" is a film about friendship and responsibility.

  3. 3

    Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

    George Roy HillDP Conrad HallIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Butch and Sundance are the two leaders of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Butch is all ideas, Sundance is all action and skill. The west is becoming civilized, and when Butch and Sundance rob a train once too often, a special posse begins trailing them no matter where they run. Over rocks, through towns, across rivers, the group is always just behind them. When they finally escape through sheer luck, Butch has another idea, "Let's go to Bolivia". Based on the exploits of the historical characters.

  4. 4

    The Sisters Brothers (2018)

    Jacques AudiardDP Benoît DebieIMDb 6.9TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Based on Patrick DeWitt's novel, This movie revolves around the colorfully named gold prospector Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who's being pursued across one thousand miles of 1850s Oregon desert to San Francisco, California by the notorious assassins Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix). Except Eli is having a personal crisis and beginning to doubt the longevity of his chosen career. And Hermann might have a better offer.

  5. 5

    Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019)

    Quentin TarantinoDP Robert RichardsonIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood visits 1969 Los Angeles, where everything is changing, as TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) make their way around an industry they hardly recognize anymore. The ninth film from the writer-director features a large ensemble cast and multiple storylines in a tribute to the final moments of Hollywood's golden age.

  6. 6

    Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

    Richard LinklaterDP Shane F. KellyIMDb 6.9TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    In Texas in the fall of 1980, college freshman Jake Bradford, a hotshot pitcher in high school, moves into an off-campus house with other members of the college baseball team. He meets several teammates, including his roommate Billy, who has been nicknamed "Beuter" because of his Deep Southern accent. He joins Finnegan, Roper, Dale, and Plummer cruising the campus by car, looking for women..

  7. 7

    Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

    Alfonso CuarónDP Emmanuel LubezkiIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    In Mexico City, late teen friends Tenoch Iturbide and Julio Zapata are feeling restless as their respective girlfriends are traveling together through Europe before they all begin the next phase of their lives at college. At a lavish family wedding, Tenoch and Julio meet Luisa Cortés, the twenty-something wife of Tenoch's cousin Jano, the two who have just moved to Mexico from Spain. Tenoch and Julio try to impress the beautiful Luisa by telling her that they will be taking a trip to the most beautiful secluded beach in Mexico called la Boca del Cielo (translated to Heaven's Mouth), the trip and the beach which in reality don't exist. When Luisa learns of Jano's latest marital indiscretion straight from the horse's mouth, she takes Tenoch and Julio's offer to go along on this road trip, meaning that Tenoch and Julio have to pull together quickly a road trip to a non-existent beach. They decide to head toward one suggested by their friend Saba, who seems a little confused himself of this beach's location. On the road trip, which ends up not being totally harmonious, the three go on a trip of discovery. For Luisa, she has to figure out what to do with her immediate future based on the news from Jano and a secret she is keeping. And Tenoch and Julio have to figure out what their friendship really means as they grow up.

  8. 8

    Gummo (1997)

    Harmony KorineDP Jean-Yves EscoffierIMDb 6.6TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Constructing this film through random scenes, director Harmony Korine abruptly jettisoned any sort of narrative plot, so here we go: Solomon and Tummler are two bored teenage boys who live in Xenia, Ohio. A few years ago, a tornado swept through it, destroying more than half the town and killing the same amount, including Solomon's father. The film, from there, chronicles the anti-social adventures these two boys have. These include sniffing glue, killing cats, having sex, riding dirtbikes, listening to black metal, and meeting a cavalcade of quirky, bizarre, and scary people. These include a man who pimps his mentally ill wife to our anti-heroes, three sisters who play with their cat and practice becoming strippers, a black midget fending off the sexual advances of a troubled man (played by the director Harmony Korine), a 12-year-old gay transvestite who is also a cat killer, Solomon's mother who seems to be the only glimpse of sanity, two foul-mouthed six-year olds, and most importantly, a nymphlike skateboarder who walks around town wearing pink rabbit ears.

  9. 9

    The Hidden Fortress (1958)

    Akira KurosawaDP Kazuo YamasakiIMDb 8.0TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    The story follows two greedy peasants in feudal Japan, Tahei and Matashichi, who are returning home from a failed attempt to profit from a war between neighboring clans. En Route they encounter the remnants of the defeated tribe that consists, most notably, of a famous General and a Princess who are hiding out in a fortress in the mountains. General Rokurota Makabe and Princess Yuki need to escape into allied territory with their large supply of gold so that they can rebuild their shattered clan. To do this the Peasants are tricked into helping them, with the promise that they will receive a large share of the gold when the destination is reached. Along the way, the General's prowess is put to the test as he must guide the 4, and later 5 with the inclusion of a freed slave, through close encounters with the pursuing enemy, and out of difficult situations the bumbling peasants manage to get them into.

  10. 10

    Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)

    Chris ColumbusDP John SealeIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    This is the tale of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), an ordinary eleven-year-old boy serving as a sort of slave for his aunt and uncle who learns that he is actually a wizard and has been invited to attend the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry is snatched away from his mundane existence by Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), the groundskeeper for Hogwarts, and quickly thrown into a world completely foreign to both him and the viewer. Famous for an incident that happened at his birth, Harry makes friends easily at his new school. He soon finds, however, that the wizarding world is far more dangerous for him than he would have imagined, and he quickly learns that not all wizards are ones to be trusted.

What male friendship films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a male friendship frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — teenager is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • teenager4.5×
  • cowboy hat3.5×
  • horse2.7×
  • boy2.4×
  • t-shirt2.4×
  • baseball cap2.3×
  • vest2.1×
  • sand2.0×

How male friendship films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate male friendship from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 26%widevs 20% baseline
  • 16%closeupvs 21% baseline
  • 52%dayvs 43% baseline

What breaks the pattern

The Irishman (2019) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 2,492 frames from 37 films carrying the male friendship label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/male-friendship

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used