Babes (2024)

Babes plays like a stack of voice memos between two best friends: most are hilarious, and a few should have stayed in drafts. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau are Eden and Dawn, pals since forever. Dawn goes into labor in the middle of their yearly Thanksgiving outing, and not long after, Eden learns she’s expecting too and decides to raise the baby solo, with Dawn, already buried under a newborn and a toddler, as her guide. The chemistry between Glazer and Buteau is the whole show, and it’s real. The story is loose, hopping from episode to episode: a babysitting night with a very wrong movie pick, a babymoon dinner that turns into a fight. Some bits land with a thud. Pamela Adlon, directing her first feature, gets how a friendship strains when one life fills up faster than the other. It holds an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and made $3.8 million domestically. A 6.4 because the friendship is funnier than the jokes. $822.75 says you lock in a yearly holiday tradition with your best friend before the credits finish.

What works: Glazer and Buteau have easy, lived-in chemistry, and the movie is honest about how tiring and lonely new parenthood can get, even inside a great friendship.

What doesn’t: It moves in loosely connected episodes rather than a story, and plenty of the comic set pieces fall flat or feel forced.

Who it’s for: Best friends who have watched each other’s lives change, and new parents who want to laugh at the exhaustion.