The relationship between brothers, or siblings in general, is a difficult thing to capture in words. I come from a family with three brothers. Brotherly bonds have all the masculine tensions and complications of a father-son dynamic, but with subtler power hierarchies. In other words, you’ve got the manly competitiveness and bravado and culturally-formed inability to articulate feelings with a less clear master and student rapport. It’s also not explored as much by the psychologically curious such as Sigmund Freud. It doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. But that only makes it more interesting when movies look closely at how brothers function with and against each other, when the subject is handled with skill and depth.
There are also plenty of examples of movies and things that examine the kind of male friendship that is meant to be analogous to brotherhood. But for our purposes here, let’s cast aside for one moment the war genre with terrific examples like Band of Brothers and look at a few more literal takes on stories of brotherly love. Here are 6 movies that offer interesting looks at how brothers often relate to one another.
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