I know it wasn't everyone's cup of tea back in 1989, but Danny DeVito's The War of the Roses brilliant used, I think, what was then one of movies' last great couplings, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, subverting romcom expectations by pitting them against one another in an acrimonious divorce that ends in violence (violence? they actively destroy what they love to spite the other!). While the case could be made that the film doesn't foreground its characters enough to justify its quick slide into a demented black comedy/thriller, the frame tale, in my opinion, does. And it doesn't matter. DeVito's vision is uncompromising and he crafts some great sequence like the potential poisoning and the chandelier finale, does a lot with close-ups on eyes, and boy, do I love that last shot of Turner, refusing that last possible compromise. This movie is SAVAGE, and the Washington DC setting is perhaps not incidental (in the book either), as it makes for a pretty great metaphor for American society in the 80s onward.

Funny movie with a very good leading couple who fights on which one can be more unlikable and unpleasant. The movie certainly feels older than it is but not in a good way.