Skip to main content
Terms of Endearment film image; three people posing

Terms of Endearment

Mother’s Day 2-for-1 Special

This event has passed

Mother’s Day Special: Get 2 adult tickets for the price of 1!

Before he created The Simpsons, James L Brooks won three Academy Awards for producing, directing, and writing Terms of Endearment (1983), based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. (Before that, he created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda). Spanning three decades in the lives of Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger), the film chronicles the ups and downs of their romantic liaisons (Emma makes the mistake of marrying someone called Flap; Aurora dates an astronaut named Garrett Breedlove) as well as their own love-hate dynamic. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll give your mom an extra hug.

The most remarkable achievement of Terms of Endearment, which is filled with great achievements, is its ability to find the balance between the funny and the sad, between moments of deep truth and other moments of high ridiculousness.

Roger Ebert

In this pungent and beautifully observed film, the most completely satisfying of this and many another year, life is fascinating, tender, hilarious, catastrophic, healing, warm and, in the main, a faintly absurd predicament in which to find oneself.

Sheila Benson, LA Times

A funny, touching, beautifully acted film that covers more territory than it can easily manage.

Janet Maslin, New York Times

Director

James L Brooks

Cast

Debra Winger, Shirley Maclaine, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Jeff Daniels, John Lithgow

Credits
Country of Origin

USA

Year

1983

Language

English

Awards

5 Academy Awards

19+
132 min

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits

Screenwriter

James L. Brooks

Cinematography

Andrzej Bartkowiak

Editor

Richard Marks

Original Music

Michael Gore

Also Playing

Lady Bird

Dir. Greta Gerwig
94 min

Greta Gerwig's first film as writer-director is a delightful, painful comedy about "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Sacramento teen on the point of swapping high school for college, and her hard-working mom, Marion (Laurie Metcalf).

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

In the Mood for Love

Dir. Wong Kar-wai
107 min

Wong Kar-wai's most acclaimed and popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses + a newly released short companion piece from 2001.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
More info

Sold Out

Casques bleues

Dir. Louise Leroux
82 min

Deployed in the DRC, women peacekeepers from Quebec bring awareness and education to "the rape capital of the world." Join us for a Q&A after the screening with filmmakers Louise Leroux and Richard Blackburn.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Folktales

Dir. Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady
106 min

Pasvik Folk High School in Norway provides a very special gap year education. Located in the far north, it teaches arctic survival skills (bushcraft and hunting) and dog sledding (mushing).

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre