Far Out
Bette Midler Crashes Elizabeth Olsen’s Favorite Films
By Tim Bradley
March 22, 2026
Some actors have a bit of a knack for assembling an incredibly impressive career full of films that not everybody has seen, but that way more people should. Elizabeth Olsen is certainly one of those, and you could quite easily spend an entire day watching her movies without wasting a single hour.
Her most recent example of ‘a film that flew massively under the radar but was ace’ is A24’s Eternity from last year, the story of an afterlife in which new souls get to spend a week deciding where to spend forever, and more importantly, who with, leading to Olsen having to choose between former loves amidst much sobbing but also top-notch humour.
It’s yet another example of a film starring her that you can implore other people to see knowing the chances are they haven’t, along with The Assessment from 2024, which is an absolutely fantastic, Black Mirror-esque look at an especially worrying future in which couples have to have someone live with them in order to win the honor of being allowed to have a baby. Olsen is so good in it, she almost outdoes Alicia Vikander, who plays her assessor, but not quite, because she is genuinely unhinged.
Then there’s Wind River from 2017, from an era when Taylor Sheridan made spectacularly tense movies like Sicario rather than endless soap operas set in the Wild West at some point. Again, Olsen is magnificent as a female FBI agent stuck out in the snow-blinding wilds of Wyoming trying to solve a series of vicious murders while Jeremy Renner tells her things like ‘that’s not how we do things out here’. Again, brilliant film.
If you need more Olsen ammunition, just look at His Three Daughters from 2023, where she plays one of three sisters who reunite to spend their father’s last day with him, only for it all to get very volatile indeed, earning a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97%, which goes to show that she rarely misses.
So what kind of movies does Olsen look to for inspiration? Luckily, we don’t have to wonder the answer to that, because the Letterboxd lot stuck their demanding microphone in her face recently, and she picked out four of her best-loved movies of all time.
First up, she selected Breaking the Waves, the Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson romance set in the Scottish Highlands from 1996, saying, “One of the best epics I’ve ever seen. It’s the best representation I’ve ever seen of God and people’s relationships to divinity. It’s a masterpiece.”
Next up, she chose Leviathan from 2014, the Russian-made film about a man battling a corrupt mayor over his ancestral home. Somewhat disappointingly, her third pick was Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories from 1980, the self-obsessed (even for Allen) story of a filmmaker attending a retrospective of his own work, which we’ll ignore, because he is a complete wrong’un.
And lastly, Olsen went with what, given her enthusiasm for it, seems to be her pick of the lot, 1996’s The First Wives Club starring Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn, saying, “I’ve probably seen that movie more than any film I’ve ever seen. I had the VHS, and I fell asleep to it almost every night. I think of it as a romantic comedy between three women, and they’re three icons that I admire greatly, who I think did something incredibly unique…I love that film, and it’s a comfort to me.”
- Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier, 1996)
- Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)
- Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980)
- The First Wives Club (Hugh Wilson, 1996)
