Years later, with her charm running out and nowhere to go, she fights to rebuild her life and find redemption. A newly sober single mom tries to pull her life together in Napa Valley while dealing with her wayward mother. A troubled youth becomes embroiled in the lives sober house of a close-knit group of people in the wealthy, upper-class neighborhood of Newport Beach, Orange County, California. In a wacky Rhode Island town, a dysfunctional family strives to cope with everyday life as they are thrown from one crazy scenario to another.

• Newspaper columnist Gwen Cummings borrows the limo at her sister’s wedding and crashes it while on her cell trying to find a replacement cake for the one she’s ruined.
• At the end of the movie, it mentions that Elton John has been sober for thirty years.
• After he refuses, their relationship spirals out of control, ending with a final encounter on Ben’s deathbed.

Some people have criticized this movie for being too light-hearted. I think this movie shows that it’s not just about stopping drinking. The big, beautiful, sometimes messy journey requires a lot of cleaning up of damaged relationships.

Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (

The tragic love story is a reminder of alcohol dependency’s darkest hours. A long-time Jackson Pollock fan, Ed Harris directed himself as the iconic artist undone by his alcoholism in this 2000 biopic. We begin in the 1940s, when Pollock is not yet an established artist, but already an established alcoholic, and a chance meeting with Peggy Guggenheim changes his artistic future for the better.

Billy Wilder and company had to make lemonade out of lemons here and at least the ending produced isn’t an ultimate worst-case scenario. Also disappointingly absent from the source material thanks to the Hays Code is Birnam’s implied homosexuality. I feel like with this one, all I really need to say is two names. If you haven’t seen this one, please write to me and tell me what sober rock you’ve been living under and why you haven’t carved out 135 minutes of your life to watch this film.

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Bullock plays Gwen Cummings, a newspaper columnist who likes to party. Eventually, she must undergo rehab due to her tendency to binge drink. While there, she explores the addictions that run in her family and finds both recovery and love. The story of a couple of battling performers who inhabit a dirty flat whilst they wait on their vocations to blast off. Withnail is a showy alcoholic who is revolted at daily life and its prejudices.

Hank Chinaski (Matt Dillon) is, after all, defined by a queasy feigned indifference towards everyone around him and a trenchant kind of misanthropy. Thankfully, Hamer succeeds in finding the right mix of bitterly funny humor and bleak drama to characterize Chinaski thanks in no small part to Dillon’s versatile performance. As an alcoholic and an intellectual that’s simultaneously too proud and disinterested to hold down menial work, Chinaski craves recognition for his writing. He even suggests to his fair-weather girlfriend Jan (the never-not excellent Lili Taylor) that people only think they need love because affection is one way people show each other that they value each other. And that’s in a weird way what makes “Factotum” so bitterly funny.

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He meets a woman by the name of Jean and begins to get his life together. Betty is played by Marie Trintignant, who is a young married alcoholic woman with two children. She has a bourgeois husband who finds out that she’s been cheating. In the movie, Wade is played by Nick Nolte, a man who is isolated from his dominating and abusive alcoholic father and ex-wife, and becomes obsessed with the notion of solving a crime involving a fatal hunting accident. Movies about addiction and recovery can serve as stark reminders of where we’ve been and serve to remind us of how we never want to get to that place again. A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster’s beloved Shih Tzu.

While some leading men in the 1940s opted to take a cue from the groundbreaking work of Humphery Bogart by adhering to more restrained performances, Milland’s portrayal of Birnam is much more traditional. More often than not, this actor leans on a pronounced sense of physicality and exaggerated line deliveries to carry the day. Believe it or not, the Production Code, which prohibited a wide array of behaviors and actions from being seen in American films from 1934 until the 1960s, did not ban all discussions of alcoholism.

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A larger percent of the population in modern civilizations are able to enjoy alcohol and the media it’s featured in recreationally. In 2017, Stratistics MRC (a global marketing research company) estimated the Global Alcoholic beverages market to be worth about $1,324 billion. This enormous demand for alcohol isn’t necessarily unexpected considering humanity’s historical love of booze, but it means that the nature of alcohol depictions has largely changed. Ex-football player and alcoholic, Brick Pollitt, drinks daily and ignores the needs of his wife.

• He is absolutely accepting of it and indulging in his alcoholism.
• If you have a favorite you think we need to see, please email us at or DM us on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.
• The makers of Home Run want the same thing as those in the secular end of the business — your financial support.
• Meg Ryan had just given us Sleepless in Seattle, the romantic comedy that ends with the guy getting the gal.