Marriage Stories

Marriage Stories

8 Episodes

Bad marriages make great movies, as evidenced by these gloriously messy, cuttingly perceptive portraits of some of the most dysfunctional relationships ever captured on-screen. With raw emotion, dramatic blowups, and soul-baring self-reflection baked into the premise, these tales of marital breakups and shakeups explore everything from jealousy, infidelity, and betrayal to the procedural complexities of divorce and separation to the myriad, sometimes barely perceptible ways in which couples drift apart. They also happen to be vehicles for some of the most personal and revealing statements from major directors like Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Ida Lupino, Lars von Trier, Federico Fellini, and others, each of whom brings fresh insight to that most universal of subjects: the mysterious intricacies of human intimacy.

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Marriage Stories
  • Marriage Stories Teaser

    Episode 1

  • La notte

    Episode 2

    Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1961 • Italy
    Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti

    This psychologically acute, visually striking modernist work was director Michelangelo Antonioni’s follow-up to the epochal L’AVVENTURA. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau star as a n...

  • Juliet of the Spirits

    Episode 3

    Directed by Federico Fellini • 1965 • Italy

    Cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo's masterful use of Technicolor transforms Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's first color feature, into a kaleidoscope of dreams, spirits, and memories. Giulietta Masina plays a betrayed wife whose inability to come to te...

  • Faces

    Episode 4

    Directed by John Cassavetes • 1968 • United States
    Starring John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Gena Rowlands

    John Cassavetes puts a disintegrating marriage under the microscope in the searing FACES. Shot in high-contrast 16 mm black and white, the film follows the futile attempts of the captain of indust...

  • A Married Couple

    Episode 5

    Directed by Allan King • 1969 • Canada

    Billy and Antoinette Edwards let it all hang out for Allan King and crew in this jaw-dropping examination of a marriage in trouble, which "makes John Cassavetes's Faces look like early Doris Day" (Time). Intense and hectic, frightening and funny, A Marrie...

  • SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE: Theatrical Version

    Episode 6

    Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1973 • Sweden
    Starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson

    SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE chronicles the many years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) through matrimony, infidelity, divorce, and subsequent partners. Shot in intense, i...

  • Certified Copy

    Episode 7

    Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2010 • Italy
    Starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

    The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami travels to Tuscany for a luminous and provocative romance in which nothing is as it appears. What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people—played by...

  • 45 Years

    Episode 8

    Directed by Andrew Haigh • 2015 • United Kingdom
    Starring Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay

    In this exquisitely calibrated film, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay perform a subtly off-kilter pas de deux as Kate and Geoff, an English couple who, on the eve of an anniversary celebration, fin...