The 30 Best Wedding Movies of All Time

A wedding hands a filmmaker most of a screenplay before a word is written. There is a deadline, fixed and public. There is a cast that would never otherwise share a room: the divorced parents, the aunt nobody invites to anything else, the ex who somehow made the list, the friend who has been drinking since the rehearsal. Everyone is dressed better than usual and behaving worse, and there is a moment built into the ceremony when anyone may stand up and object. No wonder the movies have returned to it for ninety years.

The best wedding films know that the ceremony is rarely the point. They are about what a wedding reveals: who pays, who is left behind, who is still in love with whom, and what a family looks like when it has to stand in one photograph. The thirty below are ranked for how well they understand that, how well they have lasted, and how much a person planning a wedding, or surviving one as a guest, might take from them. Each title links to its entry in our wedding movies directory, where you’ll find the other 140-odd films worth knowing. For the dresses, see the most memorable wedding dresses in the movies; for the single scenes, the greatest wedding scenes.

1. The Philadelphia Story (1940)

The Philadelphia Story is the wedding weekend as high comedy, and nothing since has been quicker on its feet. George Cukor’s film, from Philip Barry’s 1939 play, gives Katharine Hepburn the role of Tracy Lord, a Main Line heiress about to marry a dull, correct businessman. Her ex-husband, played by Cary Grant, turns up with a reporter (James Stewart) and a photographer from a gossip magazine, and the night before the wedding turns into a long, champagne-soaked reckoning. Critics count it among the finest comedies of remarriage, the Hollywood genre in which divorced couples find their way back to each other. It won Oscars for Stewart and for Donald Ogden Stewart’s screenplay, and Adrian dressed Hepburn. What endures is its argument that a wedding is a test of character as much as a celebration: Tracy has to learn some humility before she is fit to say her vows to anyone. It was remade as the musical High Society in 1956.

2. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Richard Curtis’s screenplay is the definitive film about being a wedding guest. Across five occasions, a perpetually late best man (Hugh Grant) keeps running into the same American woman (Andie MacDowell), while his friends pair off, break up and grieve around him. Four Weddings and a Funeral was shot in six weeks for under £3 million and became, at the time, the highest-grossing British film in history. Its structure is its genius: every set piece is a ceremony, so the film becomes a field guide to the English wedding, from the fumbled vows of a newly ordained priest to the marquee reception and the country church. The funeral, with John Hannah reading Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” gives the comedy its heart. And the final wedding, where the groom’s deaf brother interrupts the ceremony in sign language, is the smartest objection scene ever written. It remains the film to watch before any wedding at which you know too many people.

3. The Godfather (1972)

The greatest opening in American film is a wedding. The Godfather begins at Connie Corleone’s reception, where the band plays in the garden, the guests dance the tarantella and, in a shuttered study, her father receives a line of supplicants, because a Sicilian cannot refuse a request on his daughter’s wedding day. Francis Ford Coppola uses the sequence to introduce every major character, every loyalty and every threat in the story, while cutting between sunlight and shadow. Michael, in uniform, brings his girlfriend Kay and explains the family to her, and to us. Watch it for the sheer craft of a wedding scene that does five jobs at once: world-building, exposition, character, comedy and dread. Watch it, too, for the details that make Italian-American weddings recognizable on screen: the envelopes, the singers, the long tables and the old men in the shade. Few films have made a celebration feel so full and so dangerous at the same time.

4. Monsoon Wedding (2001)

Mira Nair’s film is the truest portrait of a big family wedding ever made. Monsoon Wedding follows a Punjabi family in Delhi over the days before their daughter’s arranged marriage to a man she has known for a few weeks. Relatives arrive from Oman, Australia and the United States; the father, played by Naseeruddin Shah, is quietly running out of money; the bride is not finished with an old love; and a young cousin is carrying a family secret that must eventually be spoken. The eccentric wedding planner, P. K. Dubey, falls for the family’s maid. Written by Sabrina Dhawan and made for about US$1.2 million, the film won the Golden Lion at Venice. It captures the chaos of the mehndi and sangeet, the tent going up, the cousins rehearsing their dances, and it treats the arrangements with affection rather than satire. When the rain finally comes, it is one of the most joyful endings in the movies.

5. Father of the Bride (1991)

For a generation of couples, Father of the Bride is the wedding movie. Charles Shyer’s remake of the 1950 film gives Steve Martin the role of George Banks, an athletic-shoe manufacturer who cannot accept that his 22-year-old daughter is engaged, and even less that the reception at the family home will cost $250 a head. Martin Short’s wedding coordinator, Franck Eggelhoffer, with his swans and his impenetrable accent, made the planner a movie character. George’s meltdown in a supermarket over hot dog buns sold in packs of twelve and hot dogs in packs of eight is the most quoted rant about wedding-season madness. Diane Keaton gives the film its steadiness, and a freak snowstorm on the eve of the wedding gives it a last-minute crisis. The film endures because it is honest about the father’s sadness and generous about the expense, and because, after the chaos, it ends with a quiet dance in an empty house.

6. Muriel’s Wedding (1994)

Toni Collette’s breakthrough is the sharpest film ever made about loving the idea of a wedding more than any actual person. Muriel Heslop, a misfit from the fictional beach town of Porpoise Spit, spends her days listening to ABBA and trying on wedding dresses in bridal shops under false pretenses. When she finally gets her big Sydney wedding, it is a sham arranged for money. P. J. Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding is funny and painful in equal measure, and Rachel Griffiths, in her film debut, is superb as the friend Muriel almost loses. The ABBA soundtrack was nearly the Village People: the band gave permission only two weeks before shooting began. For anyone who has ever felt that a wedding would fix their life, the film offers a tough, loving answer. It also has one of the great friendship endings in any film, which is the real point of the story.

7. Bridesmaids (2011)

Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s screenplay, nominated for an Oscar, made the bridesmaid the heroine at last. In Bridesmaids, Wiig plays Annie, a Milwaukee woman whose bakery has failed and whose oldest friend (Maya Rudolph) asks her to be maid of honor, just as the bride’s glamorous new friend (Rose Byrne) begins organizing everything better. The rivalry escalates from dueling toasts at the engagement party to a disastrous bridal shower and a flight to Las Vegas that never quite lands. The dress-fitting scene, after a lunch at a Brazilian restaurant, is one of the most famous in modern comedy, and Melissa McCarthy’s Megan earned an Oscar nomination. Under the jokes is an accurate picture of the fear that a friend’s wedding will leave you behind. Director Paul Feig lets the film end with a real wedding and a real reconciliation, and it is worth rewatching whenever someone hands you a planning spreadsheet.

8. The Graduate (1967)

Mike Nichols’s film ends with the most famous wedding interruption in movie history, and it isn’t giving much away to say so. Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), having wrecked his affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and his chances with her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), drives more than 300 miles to Santa Barbara, runs out of gas and reaches the church as the ceremony is ending. From the glass gallery above the congregation he pounds on the window and shouts her name. The church in the film is the United Methodist Church in La Verne, California. What makes The Graduate endure is the coda: on the back of a city bus, Elaine still in her gown, the couple’s elation fades into something much more uncertain. It remains the definitive image of the runaway bride, and a thoughtful one about what comes after the grand gesture.

9. My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)

Julia Roberts plays Julianne, a New York food critic who learns that her closest friend, a Chicago sportswriter played by Dermot Mulroney, is getting married in four days, and decides she is in love with him. She sets out to sabotage the wedding to Kimmy (Cameron Diaz), a sweet college student whose father owns the Chicago White Sox. P. J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding is a romantic comedy that refuses its star the easy ending, which is why it has lasted. Rupert Everett, as Jules’s editor George, nearly steals the film, above all at a family lunch where he leads the whole restaurant in “I Say a Little Prayer.” Diaz’s karaoke scene is a lesson in how to win a room by being bad at something. And the final dance at the reception, to “The Way You Look Tonight,” is one of the most graceful endings the genre has produced.

10. Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Jonathan Demme filmed Rachel Getting Married like a home movie, with handheld cameras and musicians playing in almost every scene, and the result is the most lifelike wedding weekend on film. Anne Hathaway plays Kym, released from rehab for her sister Rachel’s wedding at the family house in Connecticut; Rosemarie DeWitt is Rachel, who has spent her life being overshadowed by her sister’s crises. Jenny Lumet’s screenplay builds to the rehearsal dinner, where Kym’s toast, part confession and part performance, makes the room go still. The wedding itself, a multicultural, music-filled celebration, is joyful and generous, even as the family’s old grief stays at the table. This is the film for anyone who has worried about how a difficult relative will behave, and a reminder that a wedding can hold sorrow and happiness at the same time. It is also one of the best films about sisters ever made.

11. Father of the Bride (1950)

The original is gentler than the 1991 remake and in some ways wiser. Spencer Tracy plays Stanley Banks, a lawyer who sits in the wreckage of the reception and tells us how his daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) announced her engagement at dinner and everything slipped out of his control. He calculates he can afford 150 guests and ends up with 250; he suggests elopement and is overruled; he misses the engagement party because he is stuck in the kitchen mixing drinks. Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride premiered at Radio City Music Hall on May 18, 1950, twelve days after Taylor’s real wedding to Conrad Hilton Jr., and MGM made the most of it: Helen Rose designed both gowns. The film’s nightmare sequence, in which Stanley sinks into the church floor, is the best dramatization of wedding anxiety ever put on screen. Joan Bennett as the mother is the film’s quiet anchor.

12. The Wedding Banquet (1993)

Ang Lee’s second feature is a farce with real feeling underneath. Wai-Tung, a gay Taiwanese man living happily in Manhattan with his partner Simon, stages a green-card marriage to a tenant, Wei-Wei, to satisfy his parents. Then his parents fly in with US$30,000 for a proper wedding. After a courthouse ceremony that breaks his mother’s heart, his father’s former aide, who now owns a restaurant, insists on throwing the couple a banquet, and The Wedding Banquet becomes a riotous portrait of Chinese wedding customs, from the toasting rounds to the guests who invade the bridal suite. Lee plays the deception for comedy and the family for tenderness; the father, who understands more than he says, is one of the great movie parents. It was remade in 2025 by Andrew Ahn as The Wedding Banquet. The original remains the film to watch with anyone negotiating between the wedding they want and the one their family expects.

13. Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel sends an economics professor, Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), to Singapore for her boyfriend’s best friend’s wedding, where she discovers his family is extraordinarily rich and his mother (Michelle Yeoh) is not impressed. Crazy Rich Asians grossed more than $238 million and became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the 2010s. Its centerpiece is the wedding of Colin and Araminta, shot at CHIJMES, a 19th-century former convent in Singapore, with the singer Kina Grannis performing in a cameo. It is a slow, hushed, luminous set piece, and one that wedding planners have been asked to copy ever since. The film endures because it is a lavish fantasy and a sharp study of in-laws, class and belonging at once. Rachel’s mahjong game with her future mother-in-law is as good a scene about family approval as any in the genre.

14. Melancholia (2011)

The first half of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is the most beautiful and disturbing wedding reception on film. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and her new husband arrive late at a country estate because their stretch limousine can’t get around the narrow, winding road, and over one long night her depression takes hold, while the guests, her family and her employer look on. The second half deals with a rogue planet heading toward Earth. Dunst won Best Actress at Cannes for the performance. This is not a film for the week before your wedding, but it is a remarkable one about the pressure to be happy on command, and about the gap between how a day is supposed to feel and how it does. Its wedding sequence, with speeches that go wrong, a cake that must be cut on schedule and a bride who keeps slipping away, is unforgettable.

15. The Deer Hunter (1978)

Michael Cimino’s Vietnam epic spends its first hour at a wedding, and that hour is the point. Three friends from Clairton, Pennsylvania, a steel town on the Monongahela, are about to ship out; one of them marries in a Russian Orthodox church, and the whole community dances at the reception, singing along to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” The wedding scenes were filmed at St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Cleveland, with Russian folk songs including “Korobushka” and “Katyusha” played at the party. The Deer Hunter, with Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, uses the long, loose celebration to show us exactly what the war will take away. It is a demanding film. But the wedding sequence is one of the richest portraits of a working-class ethnic American wedding, with its hall, its band and its toasts, ever put on screen.

16. The Wedding Singer (1998)

Adam Sandler plays Robbie Hart, a wedding singer in 1985 Ridgefield, New Jersey, who is left at the altar and takes it out on the next reception he works. Drew Barrymore is Julia, a waitress at the reception hall who is planning her own wedding to the wrong man, and who asks Robbie to help her plan it. The Wedding Singer is the best film about the people who work weddings: the singer who has seen every kind of drunk uncle, the caterers, the waitresses and the hall. It is also a sweet romantic comedy with an excellent 1980s soundtrack and a finale on a plane to Las Vegas, where Robbie sings a song he wrote, “Grow Old with You,” with help from Billy Idol. Barrymore and Sandler have real chemistry, and the film’s affection for suburban weddings, with their cheesy bands and heartfelt toasts, is genuine.

17. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Nia Vardalos adapted her own one-woman show into My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the result is among the most profitable films ever made: it grossed $368.7 million worldwide on a $5 million budget and became the highest-grossing romantic comedy in the domestic box office, without ever being number one on the weekly chart. Toula Portokalos, a Chicago woman working in her family’s restaurant, falls for Ian Miller (John Corbett), a high school English teacher who is emphatically not Greek. Her father, who believes every word has a Greek root and that Windex cures everything, is appalled; her enormous family takes over the wedding. The film endures because almost every family recognizes itself, whatever its background, and because it treats the clash of two families with warmth rather than mockery. It led to two sequels, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3.

18. Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994)

Sooraj Barjatya’s musical is, more than any other film, the reason the Indian wedding became a blockbuster genre. Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! tells the story of two families joined by the marriage of an elder brother and sister, and of the romance between the younger siblings (Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit) that grows through the wedding festivities. Nearly the whole film is made of ceremonies, games and songs; its soundtrack, by Raamlaxman, has fourteen songs, an unusually large number for the period. It was the highest-grossing Indian film at the time of its release. Its later turn into family tragedy is famous, and we won’t spoil it, but the joy of the first half has never dimmed. For families planning a sangeet, the film remains a source of songs, games and choreography, and a portrait of how a wedding can bind two households into one.

19. Steel Magnolias (1989)

Herbert Ross’s film opens on a wedding day in a small Louisiana town, and it is the best on-screen portrait of the women who get a bride ready. Shelby (Julia Roberts) is having her hair done at Truvy’s home salon with her mother, M’Lynn (Sally Field), and the neighborhood’s formidable women; her father is outside firing blanks to scare the birds out of the trees before the reception. “My colors are blush and bashful, Mama,” Shelby insists, while M’Lynn complains that the church looks as if it has been hosed down with Pepto-Bismol. The groom’s cake is a red velvet armadillo with gray icing. Steel Magnolias later becomes a story of illness and grief, and it is a famous weepie for good reason. But its first act is a joyful, funny, completely specific wedding, and a tribute to mothers, aunts and friends who hold everything together.

20. Late Spring (1949)

Yasujirō Ozu’s masterpiece is about a wedding that barely appears on screen. Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is 27 and devoted to her widowed father (Chishū Ryū); she has no wish to marry, because it would leave him alone. Her aunt and her father set about persuading her, and in Late Spring we see the pressure, the gentle deceptions and a last trip together to Kyoto, and then Noriko in full bridal dress, leaving the house. The ceremony itself is never shown. What follows is one of the most famous closing scenes in film, and a lesson in how much can be said without a word. For parents of the bride and groom, it is the most tender film ever made about the one left behind. It is also a reminder of the quiet generosity at the heart of letting a child marry.

21. Wedding Crashers (2005)

The crashing montage is a comic love letter to every kind of American wedding, set to the crashers’ rules, recited with the gravity of scripture. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play divorce mediators who crash receptions to meet women, until they talk their way into the wedding of the Treasury secretary’s eldest daughter and are invited back to the family’s estate for the weekend. There John falls for Claire (Rachel McAdams), while Jeremy is pursued by her sister (Isla Fisher). Wedding Crashers is broad and often crude, but the first half-hour is an irresistible celebration of the wedding reception as the best party in American life. Christopher Walken plays the father, and an uncredited Will Ferrell turns up as Chazz, a former crasher who has moved on to funerals.

22. Palm Springs (2020)

Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs takes the time loop of Groundhog Day and sets it at a desert wedding. Nyles (Andy Samberg), a guest who has lived November 9 more times than he can count, meets Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the bride’s half-sister and maid of honor, and she gets pulled into the loop with him. J. K. Simmons, as a guest with a grudge, keeps turning up to hunt Nyles down. The film is genuinely funny about the rituals of wedding weekends, from the reception dances to the endless speeches, and surprisingly moving about the fear of commitment and the courage it takes to wake up to a different tomorrow. It was released on Hulu in July 2020, just as the pandemic had postponed weddings everywhere. Its maid-of-honor toast, delivered by a man who has had many chances to perfect it, is the best in years.

23. C’est la vie! (2017)

Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache’s C’est la vie! is the best film ever made about the people who work at weddings. Max (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a veteran caterer and planner, is staging a wedding at a 17th-century château, and over one long night he must manage a foul-mouthed assistant, missing staff, incompetent waiters, a vain and demanding groom, a substitute DJ with his own ideas and an electrical system that won’t hold. His marriage is in trouble, his mistress is losing patience and it is his birthday. When a runaway fireworks display and a blackout finally break him, his staff improvise something better. Anyone who has worked in hospitality will recognize every scene, and anyone planning a wedding will look at their caterer with fresh respect.

24. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)

Aditya Chopra’s debut is considered the longest-running film in the history of Indian cinema: it has played at the Maratha Mandir in Mumbai since its release on October 20, 1995. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge follows Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) and Simran (Kajol), British Indians who fall in love on a trip across Europe, though she has been promised since childhood to a man in Punjab. Raj follows her to the wedding preparations, but instead of eloping he insists on winning her father’s blessing, joining the household and charming the relatives. Manish Malhotra designed the costumes, and it was his idea to put Simran in green for the song “Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna,” an unusual color for a Punjabi bride. The film set the template for the Bollywood wedding romance, and its insistence on family consent still divides and delights audiences.

25. Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Norman Jewison’s film of the Broadway musical is essential viewing for anyone planning a traditional Jewish wedding, and for every parent of the bride. In the village of Anatevka, the milkman Tevye (Topol) agrees to the matchmaker’s plan to marry his eldest daughter, Tzeitel, to a prosperous older butcher, but Tzeitel loves Motel, the poor tailor, and persuades her father to relent. Their wedding, with the candlelit procession, “Sunrise, Sunset,” the bottle dance and the men and women dancing together for the first time, is the joyful center of Fiddler on the Roof. The celebration is cut short by violence, and the story darkens as Tevye’s other daughters choose their own husbands. The film lasts because it takes both tradition and change seriously, and because its wedding is one of the most beautiful ever staged on film.

26. Mamma Mia! (2008)

Phyllida Lloyd’s film of the ABBA stage musical is pure pleasure. On the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) reads her mother’s old diary and secretly invites three men to her wedding, any of whom might be her father, without telling her mother, Donna (Meryl Streep). Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård arrive, and the wedding is thrown into chaos. Mamma Mia! is a film of blue sea, whitewashed walls and hen parties, and its closing wedding at a clifftop chapel is a musical rather than a plausible ceremony, but that is the point. It endures because it treats mothers and daughters, and middle-aged friendship, with real warmth, and because it has inspired a generation of Greek island weddings. The sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, is best watched as the second half of a double bill.

27. The Princess Bride (1987)

Rob Reiner’s fairy tale is the wedding movie for every age. Buttercup (Robin Wright) is to marry the odious Prince Humperdinck, and her true love Westley (Cary Elwes) must fight his way back with the help of a Spanish swordsman and a gentle giant. The wedding itself, presided over by Peter Cook’s Impressive Clergyman with his unforgettable “mawwiage,” is the most quoted ceremony in film, and Humperdinck’s impatient rush through the vows is a joke that lands every time. The Princess Bride, from William Goldman’s novel, is framed as a story a grandfather reads to a sick boy, which makes it perfect for a family movie night before a wedding. It is also a romance whose central phrase, “As you wish,” has found its way into more than a few real vows and ring engravings.

28. The Best Man (1999)

Malcolm D. Lee’s debut is a smart, stylish ensemble film about friendship and the wedding weekend. Harper Stewart (Taye Diggs), a Chicago novelist whose debut has been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, travels to New York to be best man at the wedding of his college friend Lance (Morris Chestnut), a running back for the New York Giants. The trouble is that Harper’s novel is based on their circle of friends, advance copies are circulating, and one chapter could ruin the wedding. The Best Man, with Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan, Terrence Howard and Harold Perrineau, is funny, sexy and grown-up about old loyalties. It captures the rituals of the Black American wedding weekend, from the bachelor party to the rehearsal dinner, with affection, and its characters returned for the 2013 sequel. It is the best film about the pressure of being chosen to stand next to the groom.

29. Laapataa Ladies (2024)

Kiran Rao’s comedy is the most delightful wedding film of recent years. In 2001, in a fictional Indian state, a young farmer brings his new bride home by train, among several other newlywed couples, and every bride is wearing identical red with her face completely hidden by her veil. In the dark and the crush, he leads the wrong bride off the train. Laapataa Ladies follows both women: one lost at a railway station, trying to find her way to a village whose name she hardly knows, and the other, who seems in no hurry to be found. The film is gentle, funny and quietly radical about what a veil can hide and what a bride might want. It was selected as India’s entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It is a wonderful film to watch with parents and grandparents.

30. Ready or Not (2019)

The ultimate in-laws nightmare comes as a horror comedy. Grace (Samara Weaving) marries into the wealthy Le Domas family, whose fortune comes from board games, and is told on her wedding night that every new member must draw a card at midnight and play the game it names. Hers is hide-and-seek, and the family comes looking with weapons. Ready or Not, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, is violent, gleeful and very funny about the particular terror of joining someone else’s family traditions. The image of Grace fighting back in her torn wedding dress has become a horror icon. This is not a film for a nervous bride the night before, but for a couple who have survived their first family holiday together, it is a cathartic laugh, and a clever satire of old money.

How we chose

We favored films in which the wedding is the story, or at least its engine, over films with a single good wedding scene; those are in our guide to the greatest wedding scenes. We weighed how well a film has lasted, how well it understands families and ceremonies, and how much a couple or guest might recognize in it. For ideas on what to watch together before the day, see movies to watch before your wedding. And if a film has you planning your own first dance, our first dance song library is a good place to start.