Beaches

Based on a novel by Iris Rainer Dart, Beaches traces the 30-year oil-and-water friendship between free-spirited Bronx Jew CC Bloom (Bette Midler) and uptight San Francisco WASP Hillary Essex (Barbara Hershey). The two meet as children in Atlantic City (played by Mayim Bialik and Marcie Leeds) and ...more

The type of film for which the term "chick flick" was coined, Beaches dishes out all manner of weepy scenarios, including the erosion by jealousy of the central long-distance friendship and the inevitable onset of debilitating disease. Perhaps because it's such a prototype of its genre, Beaches caught on and became a guilty part of many video collections. Almost all of Beaches is maudlin -- after all, this is the film that gave the world Bette Midler's "The Wind Beneath My Wings" -- but within ...more