We start the Top 7. You finish the Top 10. When it comes to movies, ladies rule.
Some of the world's biggest stars have been born on Hollywood sound stages, and the most unforgettable of them have been women. We're fascinated by them—whether that fascination is born from admiration, repulsion or lust, the moments that made them icons stay with us.
Today, the stories women tell on screen appeal mostly to… well, other women. Girls drag reluctant dates into "Legally Blonde" or "Devine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," and whether they'll admit it or not, guys secretly enjoy it in spite of themselves. New romance classics like "A Walk to Remember" and "Moulin Rouge" seem to have a similar appeal, and thus also earn the bittersweet designation of "chick flick."
With films like "The Women" and "Sex and the City: The Movie" bringing ladies back into the center of attention (where they belong) this year, it's time to take a look at the Top 7 Chick Flicks of the past 20 years.
7. Pretty Woman (1990)
Recap: A harried businessman (Richard Gere) looking for directions picks up prostitute Vivian (Julia Roberts) on Hollywood Boulevard. He decides to hire her as his date for the week—for everything but sex. You can imagine where things lead.
Reason: Sure, it's the film that made chick flick regular Julia Roberts a bona-fide superstar—but it's also the film that set the standard for romantic comedies of the '90's.
6. Love Actually (2003)
Recap: A story with a goal: prove that love is all around us. It follows the story of eight diverse but interconnected people in Christmastime in London, each at varying stages in different kinds of love. We watch them grow closer or further apart, and as the stories coalesce, we come to the decidedly chick-flicky conclusion that love can be found almost anywhere.
Reason: Combining British screen greats like Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson and Colin Firth as well as relative newbies like Kiera Knightly was casting genius. The result was a a fresh, aptly-produced romantic comedy with a successfully non-linear storyline lesser films dream of achieving.
5. Miss Congeniality (2000)
Recap: Clumsy F.B.I. agent Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) is plucked from her world of badge-flashing and drug stings and dropped into the middle of the Miss United States pageant, where she's undercover investigating a terrorist threat. Gracie may know how to hold her own in a wrestling match, but a swimsuit competition is a whole different story.
Reason: Who knew Bullock, star of the action hit "Speed" and the girl-next-door comedy "While You Were Sleeping," could pull of tough, sexy and funny at the same time? It's her career-defining role, and always worth a laugh.
4. Steel Magnolias (1989)
Recap: The women of Truvy's Beauty Parlor live big, loud Louisiana lives, and they don't mind telling each other all about them. But when Shelby (Julia Roberts), a Type 1 diabetic, decides to go through with her risky pregnancy, things get heavy … and the laughs never stop.
Reason: With dramatic heavyweights like Sally Field and Shirley MacLaine (plus the bigger-than-life Dolly Parton) rounding out the unforgettable cast of Southern spitfires, even this, the mother of all dramadies, can't get bogged down by its own weight. It's tagline, "The funniest movie ever to make you cry," couldn't ring any more true.
3. The Notebook (2004)
Recap: After falling for each other one passionate summer, Allie (Rachel McAdams) and Noah (Ryan Gosling) are torn apart when her family moves her away from him. But after years of waiting to hear from him, Allie finds herself engaged to another man. Still, she decides to pay one last visit to the boy she could never quite get over. The rest, as they say, is history.
Reason: Though it's almost impossibly sappy, there's an emotional resonance "The Notebook" leaves behind that sticks with you. It seems to get all the important things right, and anyone (but if it's a women) who has ever been in love will be able to relate to it immediately.
2. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Recap: So, can men and women ever really be "just friends?" This is the question this film turned into a worn-out cliche. Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) disagree on the matter. He thinks not, while she clings to hope that it's possible. As their lives continue on over the course of the film, both theories are tested, proven and disproven again ... on each other. But it's the final outcome that makes this relationship one for the books.
Reason: "When Harry Met Sally" does what all great romantic comedies do, and it does it well - that is, it takes a thematic question or theory, and gives it lots of space to unravel. The characters are memorable, and the lessons even more so. (You still remember what happens in the end, don't you? That's what I mean.)
1. Clueless (1995)
Recap:A modern retelling of Jane Austen's "Emma," "Clueless" follows Cher (Alicia Silverstone), a seemingly-superficial-but-actually-just-emotionally-guarded popular chick and social queen of Beverly Hills High School. She's on a mission to do good deeds, and in the process adopts transfer student Tai (Brittany Murphy) as her next makeover project. What Cher doesn't expect is that her plan to turn Tai into a social butterfly, far from failing, may just be a bit too perfect after all.
Reason: If you can move beyond the dated '90's fashion, "Clueless" is a film that's still as relevant today as it was when Austen penned it almost 200 years ago. Not only is it a timeless story about youth and superficiality, but it also helped defined a generation of Valley girls everywhere. No wonder many women still site Cher's classic story as one of their favorites.
There's the Top 7, now what should be in the Top 10?