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Cheating in these films is rarely just a matter of someone breaking a promise. An affair can expose a dead marriage, a rigid social order, a hunger for freedom, or a fantasy that another person will solve an unhappy life. The best films about infidelity treat betrayal as a moral and emotional crisis rather than a convenient plot twist.
This ranking considers thematic importance, filmmaking achievement, emotional complexity, critical reputation, and influence. It includes consummated affairs, emotional betrayals, secret relationships, and romances that remain deliberately unfulfilled.
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30. The Lovers (1958)
Directed by Louis Malle
A frustrated married woman abruptly rejects the conventions governing her life after an encounter with a stranger. Malle’s controversial film presents adultery less as a social offense than as a revolt against sexual and emotional numbness. Its bluntness gives the movie a startling modernity.
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Directed by Hong Sang-soo
A new employee arrives at a publishing company on the same day her married boss is dealing with the consequences of an affair. Repeated conversations and shifting perspectives make the truth feel unstable. Hong turns infidelity into a study of awkwardness, selective memory, and self-serving explanations.
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28. Madame de… (1953)
Directed by Max Ophüls
A pair of earrings passes from one character to another as a married woman’s deception develops into a dangerous romance. Ophüls makes the social performance surrounding adultery as important as the affair itself. The film is visually sumptuous, but its elegance conceals a bleak account of pride and betrayal.
27. La Femme infidèle / The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
Directed by Claude Chabrol
When a husband discovers his wife’s affair, he responds with unnerving restraint before the marriage’s polite surface gives way to violence. Chabrol examines bourgeois domesticity as a carefully maintained order built on possession, secrecy, and control.
26. La peau douce / The Soft Skin (1964)
Directed by François Truffaut
A married literary scholar begins an affair with a young flight attendant and attempts to divide his life between domestic respectability and romantic escape. Hotels, airports, phone calls, and travel become machinery for concealment. Truffaut’s film is less a glamorous romance than a precise portrait of ordinary dishonesty.
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25. The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
When a marriage collapses amid separation, resentment, and revelations about affairs, the children absorb the conflict in damaging ways. Infidelity is not treated as an isolated adult problem; it becomes part of the emotional wreckage of divorce and the stories parents tell to justify themselves.
24. The Ice Storm (1997)
Directed by Ang Lee
Set in 1970s Connecticut, the film follows two families drifting through affairs, wife-swapping, alcohol, drugs, and emotional disconnection. A husband’s relationship with his neighbor is one symptom of a wider social and domestic collapse. Ang Lee’s cold, controlled style makes the characters’ loneliness even more apparent.
23. Little Children (2006)
Directed by Todd Field
Two married suburban parents begin an affair while their spouses and children remain close by. Their relationship offers excitement and escape, but not the transformation they imagine. The film is especially sharp about moral cowardice: the characters recognize the harm they may cause and continue anyway.
22. The Last Picture Show (1971)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
In a dying Texas town, young people and neglected adults pursue affairs, casual sex, and fleeting attachments. The infidelity storylines belong to a larger portrait of loneliness, sexual confusion, and emotional irresponsibility. The film understands that people often betray one another not from certainty, but from emptiness.
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Directed by Ang Lee
Two men sustain a secret romance across decades while marrying women and maintaining separate public lives. Their infidelity cannot be separated from homophobia, repression, and the limited choices available to them. The result is a tragedy about divided identities and the human cost of treating private desire as something that must remain hidden.
20. The Age of Innocence (1993)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
An engaged New York lawyer falls in love with a married woman who has become an outsider in high society. The affair remains largely unconsummated, but that restraint is central to the film’s power. Manners, gossip, and social convention regulate desire as effectively as marriage vows.
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19. The Painted Veil (2006)
Directed by John Curran
A woman’s affair reveals how emotionally empty her marriage has become. When the couple later confronts a cholera epidemic in China, betrayal becomes the starting point for a difficult examination of responsibility, forgiveness, and love that has to be rebuilt rather than presumed.
18. Take This Waltz (2011)
Directed by Sarah Polley
A married woman is drawn to a neighbor and struggles to distinguish the promise of new desire from lasting intimacy. The film refuses to label adultery simply as liberation or villainy. Its real subject is anticipation: the intoxicating period before a choice becomes a consequence.
17. Revolutionary Road (2008)
Directed by Sam Mendes
A seemingly ideal suburban marriage deteriorates under frustrated ambition, emotional cruelty, and an extramarital relationship. The affair is part of a larger failure: both partners resent the roles they inhabit, yet neither can imagine a way out that does not injure the other.
16. The End of the Affair (1999)
Directed by Neil Jordan
A novelist looks back on his wartime affair with a married woman after she ends it without giving him a satisfying explanation. Jealousy, surveillance, religious doubt, grief, and resentment complicate the familiar triangle of husband, wife, and lover. The affair survives as an obsession even after the relationship has ended.
15. Unfaithful (2002)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
A suburban wife begins an affair with a younger man, and the marriage changes irreversibly when her husband learns the truth. The film’s erotic-thriller surface is supported by unusually sustained attention to guilt, family life, emotional dependence, and what discovery does to everyone involved.
14. Match Point (2005)
Directed by Woody Allen
A married former tennis professional resumes an affair with his brother-in-law’s former girlfriend after entering London’s wealthy upper class. Desire collides with social ambition, and the film’s moral universe is governed by luck as much as by choice. Its bleakness comes from showing how easily privilege can protect wrongdoing.
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13. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
A woman discovers that her lawyer husband is having an affair with her sister. An old friend’s arrival destabilizes the household, while videotaped confessions turn private sexuality into a form of observation and performance. The film suggests that sexual dishonesty is often a symptom of deeper emotional evasions.
12. The Piano (1993)
Directed by Jane Campion
An arranged marriage in nineteenth-century New Zealand is disrupted when Ada develops a forbidden attraction to a frontiersman. The affair is bound up with bodily autonomy, repression, possession, and artistic expression. Campion does not separate erotic desire from the question of who has the right to control Ada’s life.
11. The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
Directed by Terence Davies
A judge’s wife leaves a passionless marriage for an affair with an ex-RAF pilot, only to discover that intensity does not guarantee happiness. Set against postwar Britain, the film observes the social and psychological costs of choosing desire when the alternatives are respectability, loneliness, and regret.
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10. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Directed by Tay Garnett
A drifter and a married diner owner begin a passionate affair and conspire to murder her husband. Their desire quickly becomes entangled with greed, violence, guilt, and paranoia. It is foundational film noir because adultery is not merely the source of scandal; it drives the characters into criminal self-deception.
9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
A womanizing surgeon struggles between his wife and his independent mistress during the Prague Spring. The film treats infidelity as a philosophical problem involving sexual freedom, jealousy, commitment, and fear of emotional dependence. Its political setting enlarges the private conflict without reducing the characters to symbols.
8. The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
While her family is away, a married Iowa housewife has a four-day affair with a visiting photographer. The film’s distinctive concern is not simply whether the romance is genuine, but what happens after the choice: how one brief relationship can shape decades of memory, family identity, and regret.
7. The English Patient (1996)
Directed by Anthony Minghella
A wartime romance between a married woman and a Hungarian cartographer becomes the emotional center of an epic about memory, guilt, and desire. The film moves between the affair and its later consequences, showing how wartime trauma can preserve love, shame, and responsibility in distorted forms.
6. Double Indemnity (1944)
Directed by Billy Wilder
An insurance salesman becomes the lover and murder accomplice of a married woman who wants her husband dead. Lust, manipulation, betrayal, and greed are fused into one criminal scheme. The film’s famous hard-boiled dialogue cannot hide the central truth: both lovers mistake mutual exploitation for partnership.
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Directed by Mike Nichols
Benjamin Braddock begins a secret affair with the married Mrs. Robinson before becoming involved with her daughter. The resulting triangle turns adultery into a comedy of alienation, sexual initiation, and generational conflict. Benjamin’s passivity is crucial: he is less a confident seducer than a young man allowing other people’s expectations to direct his life.
4. The Apartment (1960)
Directed by Billy Wilder
An insurance clerk lends his apartment to executives for extramarital encounters, hoping the arrangement will advance his career. He then falls for the elevator operator involved with his married boss. Wilder combines workplace satire, romantic comedy, depression, adultery, and moral compromise without allowing any one genre to make the situation comfortable.
3. Brief Encounter (1945)
Directed by David Lean
A married doctor and housewife fall in love after meeting at a railway station. Their affair is principally emotional, and the film’s defining drama lies in their attempt to reconcile desire with family responsibility. Lean makes restraint intensely cinematic: glances, train journeys, interrupted meetings, and imagined futures carry the weight of physical consummation.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.2. In the Mood for Love (2000)
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
Two neighbors discover that their spouses are having an affair and develop a restrained, deeply conflicted intimacy of their own. The film asks whether responding to betrayal by repeating it makes the injured partners complicit in the same behavior. Its carefully framed corridors, repeated encounters, and withheld emotions turn infidelity into a question of dignity, imitation, repression, and memory.
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1. The Apartment? A note on the ranking
Correction: the top three are deliberately close.
Although The Apartment is listed at number four above, In the Mood for Love takes the top position in this ranking because it makes infidelity inseparable from style, social behavior, and moral self-control. Brief Encounter follows closely for its extraordinary study of emotional betrayal without conventional sexual consummation. The Apartment remains one of the most complete films on the subject because its affair plot is also a critique of corporate power and loneliness.
How these films approach cheating differently
| Approach | Examples | What the affair reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Desire restrained before consummation | In the Mood for Love, Brief Encounter, The Age of Innocence | Dignity, repression, social pressure, and the power of what remains unspoken |
| Adultery as criminal escalation | Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lust, Caution | Manipulation, political danger, violence, and compromised trust |
| Affair as escape from domestic life | Unfaithful, Take This Waltz, Little Children | Dissatisfaction, fantasy, boredom, and the limits of romantic reinvention |
| Infidelity within social repression | Brokeback Mountain, The Deep Blue Sea, The Piano | Gender roles, sexuality, class, and the cost of living according to public expectations |
| Family damage and aftermath | The Squid and the Whale, Revolutionary Road, The Painted Veil | How betrayal alters children, marriages, memory, and responsibility |
Honorable mentions and essential context
The list includes films in which the central betrayal is not always a conventional affair. In Brokeback Mountain, two married men maintain a secret relationship while public life forces them into separate domestic identities. In Lust, Caution, sexual intimacy is also part of a political operation. In Madame de…, a material object becomes the mechanism through which deception travels.
That wider definition matters. The strongest films about cheating do not ask only, “Who slept with whom?” They ask what the affair exposes: class anxiety in The Apartment, emotional dishonesty in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, failed ambition in Revolutionary Road, social upheaval in The Ice Storm, and the damage adults pass on to children in The Squid and the Whale.
FAQ
What is the best movie about cheating and infidelity?
In the Mood for Love is the strongest overall choice on this list. It treats infidelity as a problem of dignity, imitation, repression, and memory rather than as a simple scandal. Brief Encounter is an equally powerful choice if you prefer a film centered on emotional betrayal and restraint.
Which films about infidelity do not show a consummated affair?
Brief Encounter, In the Mood for Love, and The Age of Innocence are centrally concerned with desire, emotional betrayal, or the refusal to cross a final boundary. Their lack of conventional consummation is part of what makes them so psychologically rich.
What is the best infidelity movie with a crime story?
Double Indemnity is the essential answer, with The Postman Always Rings Twice as another foundational film-noir example. Both begin with adultery but push desire toward murder, manipulation, guilt, and paranoia.
Which movie best shows the effect of an affair on a family?
The Squid and the Whale is particularly valuable because it shows marital collapse from the children’s perspective. Revolutionary Road and Unfaithful are stronger choices if you want the focus to remain on the couple and the consequences of discovery.
Are there LGBTQ+ films about cheating on this list?
Yes. Brokeback Mountain presents a secret romance between two men who marry women while maintaining a relationship over many years. Its infidelity story is inseparable from repression, homophobia, domestic obligation, and the danger of living a divided public and private life.
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The Bottom Line
The most enduring films about infidelity understand that cheating is rarely the whole story. It may be an act of selfishness, a desperate attempt at escape, a rebellion against social rules, or an expression of a relationship that was already broken. Start with In the Mood for Love for restraint and ambiguity, Brief Encounter for emotional conflict, The Apartment for darkly comic moral compromise, or Double Indemnity for adultery pushed into noir catastrophe.
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