Terms of Endearment

Director: James L. Brooks

1983 / 132min / 35mm

Brooks’s debut feature is so often discussed as the quintessential tearjerker that we sometimes lose track of the fact that it is also a truly magnificent American film, an empathetic human epic that doesn’t strike a single false note. At the film’s heart is the thorny mother-daughter relationship between Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, followed over the course of 30 years, through bust-ups and makeups, in sickness and in health. With Jack Nicholson as MacLaine’s alcoholic, womanizing ex-astronaut neighbor, who weaves into and upends her too-tidy life.