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Best Sibling relationship Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of sibling relationship cinema — measured across 6,880 indexed frames from 93 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Sibling relationship films over-index on boy, child and girl — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    The Cat In The Hat (2003)

    Bo WelchDP Emmanuel LubezkiIMDb 4.1TMDB 5.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Conrad and Sally Walden (Spencer Breslin and Dakota Fanning) are home alone with their pet fish. It is raining outside, and there is nothing to do. Until The Cat in the Hat ('Mike Myers') walks in the front door. He introduces them to their imagination, and at first it's all fun and games, until things get out of hand, and The Cat must go, go, go, before their mother gets back, but their pompous neighbor has bigger plans for them.

  2. 2

    To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)

    Robert MulliganDP Russell HarlanIMDb 8.2TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    Scout Finch, 6, and her older brother Jem live in sleepy Maycomb, Alabama, spending much of their time with their friend Dill and spying on their reclusive and mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley. When Atticus, their widowed father and a respected lawyer, defends a black man named Tom Robinson against fabricated rape charges, the trial and tangent events expose the children to evils of racism and stereotyping.

  3. 3

    Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

    Isao TakahataDP Nobuo KoyamaIMDb 8.5TMDB 8.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    In the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted, Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive.

  4. 4

    My Neighbour Totoro (1988)

    Hayao MiyazakiDP Hisao ShiraiIMDb 8.1TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Two young girls, 10-year-old Satsuki and her 4-year-old sister Mei, move into a house in the country with their father to be closer to their hospitalized mother. Satsuki and Mei discover that the nearby forest is inhabited by magical creatures called Totoros (pronounced toe-toe-ro). They soon befriend these Totoros, and have several magical adventures.

  5. 5

    The Tree Of Life (2011)

    Terrence MalickDP Emmanuel LubezkiIMDb 6.8TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    The impressionistic story of a Texas family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.

  6. 6

    Hocus Pocus (1993)

    Kenny OrtegaDP Hiro NaritaIMDb 6.9TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    300 years have passed since the Sanderson sisters were executed for practicing dark witchcraft. Returning to life thanks to a combination of a spell spoken before their demise and the accidental actions of Max, the new-kid-in-town, the sisters have but one night to secure their continuing existence...

  7. 7

    Lights Out (2016)

    David F. SandbergDP Marc SpicerIMDb 6.3TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    A man called Paul is working after hours and is murdered by a supernatural entity in the shadow. When his son, the boy Martin, is frightened by the same creature, he sees his mother Sophie talking to an imaginary friend called Diana in the shadow of her room. Martin does not sleep anymore during the night. His older step sister Rebecca who lives alone is summoned by the social assistant. She brings Martin home and recalls her own experience with Diana years ago when she was young. Rebecca and her boyfriend Bret investigate the connection of Sophie with Diana and come up to a scary revelation about their past.

  8. 8

    Mary Poppins (1964)

    Robert StevensonDP Edward ColmanIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    When Jane and Michael Banks are faced with the prospect of a new nanny, they are pleasantly surprised by the arrival of the magical Mary Poppins. Embarking on a series of fantastical adventures with he and her Cockney performer friend, Bert, they try to pass on some of her sunny attitude to their preoccupied parents.

  9. 9

    Addams Family Values (1993)

    Barry SonnenfeldDP Donald PetermanIMDb 6.9TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    When an adorable baby boy is added to the Addams household, Wednesday and Pugsley do not hate him, they just aren't necessarily excited about his existence. OK...yeah, they do hate him. So they plot to get rid of him one way or another. Meanwhile, their parents hire a nanny for him and she charms Fester, but has evil intentions for him. The Addamses must stop her, but how?

  10. 10

    Fanny and Alexander (1982)

    Ingmar BergmanDP Sven NykvistIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    It's the early twentieth century Sweden. Adolescent siblings Alexander and Fanny Ekdahl lead a relatively joyous and exuberant life with their well-off extended paternal family, led by the family matriarch, their grandmother, Helena Ekdahl. The openness of the family culture is exemplified by Helena's now deceased husband ending up becoming best friends with one of her lovers, a Jewish puppet maker named Isak Jacobi, and their Uncle Gustav Adolf's open liaison with one of the family maids, Maj, who everyone in the family adores, even Gustav Adolf's wife, Alma. Between the siblings, Alexander in particular has inherited the family's love of storytelling, his parents and his grandmother who are actors and who manage their own theater. Things change for Alexander and Fanny when their father, Oscar, dies shortly after Christmas 1907. Although she truly does believe she loves him, the children's mother, Emilie, decides to marry Bishop Edvard Vergérus, who she first met as the officiate at Oscar's funeral. She also wants a father figure for the children. Going into the marriage, Emilie has inclinations that it will be a much different life than she had with the Ekdahls, but is not prepared for the harsh, austere and strict life Edvard rules with an iron fist. Emilie, Alexander and Fanny end up being prisoners in the bishop's stark and humorless house. As Alexander butts head with his stepfather and tries to learn how to keep to his own principles while obeying Edvard, Emilie tries to figure out a way to regain her and her children's own destiny, as Edvard will not consent to divorce, and her "desertion" in the eyes of the law means that Alexander and Fanny would become his wards.

What sibling relationship films are made of

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

  • boy2.5×
  • child1.9×
  • girl1.8×
  • grass1.6×
  • curtains1.6×

How sibling relationship 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 sibling relationship from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 85%eye levelvs 69% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Punch Drunk Love (2002) 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 6,880 frames from 93 films carrying the sibling relationship 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/sibling-relationship

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