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Comedies, dramas, and musicals all benefit from a little romance. From unrequited love to a funny night out, our romance collection will make your heart go pitter patter.

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320 best romance movies to watch - a good movie to watch, is love in the air it sure is all over streaming platforms, where there's no shortage of romance to cuddle up to. from intimate dramas to love-fuelled adventures, here are the best romance movies and shows to stream now..

Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)

Enchanted April (1991)

The Quiet American (2002)

Chasing Amy (1997)

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Trick (1999)

Lust, Caution (2007)

Mona Lisa (1986)

Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996)

Falling in Love Like in Movies (2023)

Italian for Beginners (2000)

An Autumn’s Tale (1987)

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The 50 Greatest Romantic Movies of All Time

It’s the closest thing there is to a universal genre. That’s because, with rare exceptions, everyone falls in love, or at least wants to. And when you think about it, almost every movie is a love story. Thrillers, comedies, sci-fi — no matter what the form, the spectacle of two people falling in love in the middle of it has always been what makes the world of movies go round. That’s why choosing the greatest movie love stories presents a special challenge. Because really, what isn’t a contender? In a way, though, we kept our criteria simple. We were looking for grand passion, for chemistry and heat and all that good stuff. Yet there’s an ineffable quality that elevates a truly great movie romance. Let’s call it the Swoon Factor. It’s about the swoon that happens onscreen; it’s about the swoon that happens between the audience and the screen. What follows are the 50 films that, more than any others, got our hearts racing.     

Dirty Dancing (1987)

Set in 1963 but oh-so-’80s in its idea of hairstyles and heartthrobs, this sexy summer-camp romance defied its critics to become a classic. Nicknaming Jennifer Grey’s character “Baby” went a long way to illustrate what’s really going on here: The teenage daughter of conservative Jewish parents is forever being infantilized by her folks, until she meets a slightly older — but undeniably adult — dance teacher (Patrick Swayze) who shows her the time of her life. Corrupted by rock ’n’ roll, Baby grows up fast, getting over her initial shyness (“I carried a watermelon”) while rehearsing with her seductive instructor, who practices a racy new style of close-contact, ultra-suggestive moves that can only be read as carnal. Like “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Grease” before it, the movie plays on the fantasy of an off-limits attraction between Baby and the bad boy. — Peter Debruge

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

In this gold-standard screwball caper comedy, a gentleman thief, a lady pickpocket and a Parisian heiress form an elegant triangle, the preferred shape of Ernst Lubitsch — that sublime architect of romantic instability — who loved to test how seemingly solid couples might respond to a good romantic upset. Here, the temptation isn’t merely sentimental, as there’s a potential fortune on the line. What’s more, Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins) make clear from the moment they meet that each is perfectly capable of robbing the other blind. She boosts his wallet, he knicks her garter (we needn’t see the deed to be scandalized). The movie came out before the Production Code, and it sparkles with the kind of naughty innuendo that was soon prohibited in Hollywood, but which Lubitsch was sophisticated enough to suggest even behind closed doors. — PD

Splash (1984)

A man falls in love with a mermaid: What could be simpler, or sweeter, than that? Yet Tom Hanks, in the movie that made him a movie star, does not go lightly into his communion with a woman who’s half-fish. Ron Howard’s landmark comedy was one of the first films to demonstrate that a high-concept premise could be executed in a way that was artful and classic: a throwback to the Hollywood that used fantasy to put us in touch with reality. Daryl Hannah, as Madison the red-tailed mermaid, acts with a dazed curiosity and eagerness that’s irresistible, and Hanks turns his disgruntlement into a profound expression of love’s challenge – namely, that we can’t choose who we love, but we can choose to embrace the love that chose us. — Owen Gleiberman

The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

Amid a career of macho performances, Clint Eastwood tapped into his sensitive side to deliver one of his most indelible characters in Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photographer on assignment in Iowa, who stops by a farmhouse to ask for directions. He’s greeted by Francesca, a lonely war bride who offers to show him around (an Italian-accented Meryl Streep, who says so much in her silent gestures, like the way she absentmindedly touches herself in the places she wants to be caressed). It’s no big surprise that this dissatisfied housewife develops feelings for this stranger. More touching is Kincaid’s admission that he’s fallen for Francesca, too, but knows she has no intention of leaving her family. Still, that doesn’t stop him from trying. “This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime,” he tells her. The sight of Kincaid looking desperate in the rain, the downpour likely masking tears, is so radically counter-Eastwood, you’ve gotta believe it. — PD

The Notebook (2004)

In the two decades since “The Notebook,” Ryan Gosling has cultivated his image as a chiseled heartthrob to such a degree that he seemed the perfect choice to play a live-action Ken doll in the “Barbie” movie. But back when director Nick Cassavetes was casting the role of Noah Calhoun, he saw the actor (and former Mouseketeer) differently — as someone both relatable and reckless enough to chase his dream girl (Rachel McAdams’ Allie) up a Ferris wheel. No matter what Allie does, he keeps on loving her in the best possible version Hollywood can make of a Nicholas Sparks novel. The secret formula here comes in catching up with Noah and Allie half a century later, as played by screen legends James Garner and Gena Rowlands, coupled with the tear-jerky reason we’ve been reliving all their most romantic memories. — PD

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

The colors gush in Douglas Sirk’s lush 1950s melodrama, about a New England widow, Cary (Jane Wyman), who falls for the studly but respectful hunk (Rock Hudson) who tends the trees at her house. It may be love, but her two grown children — and nearly the entire community — are disapproving of Cary’s feelings, pressuring her to break off the relationship. Seen today, neither the age difference nor the class divide seem like deal-breakers, which makes Cary’s sacrifice seem all the more futile. (Years later, Todd Haynes updated the dynamic with a Black gardener and a still-living gay husband in “Far from Heaven.”) During the 1950s, Hudson carved out a niche as a sensitive leading man, to the point that he’s almost pathetic here (consider the state of him in the final scene). Others may try to meddle, but in the end, it’s her decision alone whom she loves. — PD

The Sound of Music (1965)

You might ask: How romantic could a musical this notoriously G-rated and squeaky-clean really be? But if “The Sound of Music” has incandescent songs, as well as a singular true-life story about the Von Trapp Family Singers (seven motherless Austrian children returned to vitality through the life force of Julie Andrews’ nun-turned-governess Maria), the movie’s secret weapon is its love story. Andrews, while she’s certainly playing the soul of goodness, invests her slow-blooming affection for Christopher Plummer’s Capt. Von Trapp with an almost forbidden sense of broken decorum. And Plummer, who looks like he belongs in a far darker movie, plays the captain as a lost man literally coming back to existence. When these two dance and realize, at the very same moment, that they’ve fallen in love, it’s one of the most electrifying scenes in movie history. — OG

Once (2007)

It’s not unusual to see a musical scale the heights of romantic passion. What’s different about John Carney’s film is that it’s a small-scale, non-stylized, kitchen-sink indie drama, yet in its lo-fi and platonic way it uses songs to create the majesty and devotion of a musical daydream. On the sidewalks of Dublin, a 30ish busker (Glenn Hansard) strums a guitar with a worn-out hole where the pick board should be. Most folks pass him by, but a girl (Markéte Irglová) lingers. They’re drawn into each other’s orbit, and though we never learn their names, a romance — or is it? — begins to play out in the songs they sing together. They both have other relationships, yet ”Once” tells the delicate tale of how, through song, these two save each other. As they give themselves over to numbers like “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” the movie swoons, and you will too. — OG

Pretty Woman (1990)

Some think of it as the ultimate guilty-pleasure rom-com. Others say that its story of a wealthy businessman (Richard Gere) who hires an escort (Julia Roberts) for a week to be his public romantic partner represents Hollywood at it most reprehensibly sexist. The truth, however, falls right in between. “Pretty Woman” only got tagged with the guilty-pleasure label because it came out at the dawn of the modern rom-com era (it sparkles like Tracy and Hepburn next to a lot of the films that came afterward). And as far as morality goes, it’s not the movie that’s sexist. It’s the world of high-gloss commodification that Vivian, played by Roberts not just with the boldest smile of her era but with the vivacity that turned her into a singular movie star, must navigate. Look closely at the dance of chemistry and arbitration between Roberts and Gere, and you’ll see that “Pretty Woman,” in its slickly-packaged-by-director-Garry Marshall way, is nothing less than a screwball celebration of the politics of love. — OG

Mississippi Masala (1991)

Mira Nair took a pioneering risk in depicting the romance between Demetrius (Denzel Washington), a blue-collar Black carpet cleaner, and Mina (Sarita Choudhury), a young Indian woman whose family fled Uganda to the American South. Set in Greenwood, Miss., where locals helped the creative team finesse the authenticity of the movie’s dialogue and detail, Nair’s contemporary interracial romance confronts the pushback of both the African American and South Asian communities to Demetrius and Mina’s relationship. But unlike Sidney Poitier social drama “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” her parents’ reaction makes up just a fraction of the script, which gives complex backstories to each side of the couple. It’s also incredibly sexy, whether they’re chatting by phone in separate beds or sharing the same one in the movie’s scorching love scene. The movie argues for colorblindness while celebrating both cultures, modeling a relationship never before seen on screen. — PD

Say Anything (1989)

“Optimism is a revolutionary act,” writer-director Cameron Crowe quips in the commentary for his late-’80s teenage touchstone. That kind of radical confidence drives high school senior Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), who musters the nerve to ask out valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), even though all his peers think she’s out of his league. At first, Lloyd may seem like a nobody when compared to his most-likely-to-succeed sweetheart, but over time, he proves to be loyal, decent and unflappably sincere — qualities that made him the model boyfriend for kids of the ’80s. The clincher: Even when dumped, he shows up with a boombox, blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” outside her window. The gesture became an iconic declaration of love for a generation … and still holds up, even if the technology is obsolete. — PD

The Way We Were (1973)

Today, it would probably be a rom-com about opposites attracting: Katie (Barbra Streisand), a wisecracking Marxist Jewish political activist, and Hubbell (Robert Redford), a debonair WASP writer born with the entitlement not to have to worry about “causes.” But 50 years ago, when the story was filmed by director Sydney Pollack not as a comedy but as a romantic drama of tumultuous love-hate passion, the film, in its high-end soap-opera way, seemed to be expressing something new in the culture — the way that love, after the 1960s, was no longer going to be asking people to stay in their ethnic lanes. “The Way We Were” is a hefty slice of middlebrow Hollywood corn, yet the irresistible tug of it is that Streisand and Redford embody their characters on a level of romantic mythology. And let’s not forget the power of that title song! As sung by Streisand, it’s the incarnation of nostalgic beauty. — OG

Carol (2015)

Movies that involve romantic stories of same-sex couples are inevitably placed in a category called “gay” or “queer” or whatever, often by their biggest fans. Yet if you think about it for five seconds, that’s a retrograde way of putting movies into boxes. The director Todd Haynes has made several masterpieces (“Far From Heaven,” “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story”), but he has never made a drama more darkly romantic and enticing, more seductive in its suspense, more mired in the agonizing compulsion of love than this lavishly mesmerizing adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel “The Price of Salt.” During the Christmas shopping season, Therese (Rooney Mara), a New York department-store clerk, meets Carol, a woman of the world played by Cate Blanchett with a femme fatale swagger just this side of threatening. Their relationship will be fraught with the drama of divorce, blackmail, a private detective, and other elements that, as staged by Haynes, acquire the heightened quality of a vintage film noir. The final scene, set in the bar of the Oak Room, features one of the most transporting locked-gazes-across-a-crowded-room moments you’ll ever see. — OG

The Bodyguard (1992)

Is there anything more romantic than someone jumping in front of a bullet for you? Technically, that’s Frank Farmer’s job, but by the time Kevin Costner’s clean-cut, ex-Secret Service agent leaps in to protect endangered diva Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston) — on Oscar night, no less — we know he’s acting out of love more than duty. Frank sweeps both audiences and Rachel off their feet much earlier in the film, during a concert meltdown where he lifts her up and carries her through the mob — a chivalrous image immortalized on the film’s poster. Amazingly enough, “The Bodyguard” never made a big deal of its interracial romance, and that itself was a big deal. Powered by one of the all-time great soundtracks, the pop blockbuster is a classy entry in the oft-smarmy category of R-rated ’90s thrillers. Recent talks of a remake raise the question of which couple could out-sizzle Costner and Houston. — PD

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Marriage, they say, has its ups and downs. But it’s doubtful that any movie has ever dramatized the ebb and flow of feeling in a relationship with the primal power of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic. In outline, it could almost be a murderous film noir: A man — known only as The Man (George O’Brien), and haunted by better times with his wife, known only as The Wife (Janet Gaynor) — leaves the farmhouse where they live with their child to be with a woman from the city (Margaret Livingston). She wants him to drown The Wife, and part of the film’s shock is that he nearly does. But “Sunrise” proceeds as a series of shocks, which have the effect of jolting love back to life. Shot as a kind of sensuous living daydream, it is the cinema’s most profound and stirring roller-coaster of passion, an affirmation of what it means for two people to be meant for each other. — OG

The Princess Bride (1987)

Presented as a beloved fairy tale passed down between generations, screenwriter William Goldman’s tongue-in-cheek riff on classic adventure tales takes the best parts of nearly a century of cinematic love stories and remixes them for the home-video set (the goal was to get through to media-savvy audiences who thought they’d seen it all). Starting with two impossibly beautiful leads in Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, he builds a legend of swashbuckling pirates, dangerous rescues and well-earned revenge, describing it all (via kindly narrator Peter Falk) as the ultimate example of the form. That’s an impossible tall order — a genre-straddling smorgasbord the studio didn’t know how to market at the time — which director Rob Reiner miraculously achieves by enlisting an astonishing ensemble. Everyone from Billy Crystal to Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn to Andre the Giant assemble to support the sacrifice Westley makes to save his beloved Buttercup from marrying the wrong guy. — PD

Past Lives (2023)

Two men and a woman sit at a bar, and before the audience knows anything about them, we try to figure out what their relationship is. Who belongs with whom? That we can’t entirely tell is key to what makes Celine Song’s remarkable drama such a haunting fable of love’s enigma. It turns out that Nora (Greta Lee), a New Yorker born and raised until the age of 12 in South Korea, is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a mouthy homegrown American she met at a writers’ retreat. The other man, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), is the childhood friend Nora has maintained ties with; he’s at once her past, the spirit of her homeland, and maybe her romantic partner in another avenue of existence. “Past Lives” is a movie that will strike chords of recognition in any true romantic, as it’s about the secret journey that love takes: a communion that may occur in this life, or that may just be waiting for the next one. — OG

Beauty and the Beast (1946)

It’s one of the most poetic distillations of romantic desire in all of movies; you could also call it the “Splash” of its day. Jean Marais plays the Beast, who in Jean Cocteau’s film is a kind of delicate aristocrat with the face of a courtly lion. Josette Day is Belle, who ends up imprisoned in the Beast’s castle to work off a debt accrued by her father. What follows is an intricate fairy tale of deception and magic, built around the luminous ingenuity of Cocteau’s visual effects. Yet the most magical thing about it is the bond that develops between Belle and her disarmingly chivalrous captor/lover, a character so touching in his passion that when Greta Garbo saw the movie, it’s reported that she reacted to his death at the end by crying out, “Give me back my Beast!” — OG

Love & Basketball (2000)

The title of this Y2K sports classic references two very different games, and the rules aren’t fair in either one. After discovering that they both love basketball, Monica cockily challenges childhood friend Quincy to a match (later, famously, she’ll play for his heart). Monica wins that first bout, but he winds up injuring her — an early sign that the dynamic is different when two sexes occupy the court at the same time. That gap widens as they grow up (into Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan). He finds it relatively easy to follow in the footsteps of his NBA-pro dad, whereas there’s no equivalent path for female players. Writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood empathizes with Monica, who watches fame go to her old friend’s head. Per the formula, audiences are conditioned to root for the romance to work out, but basketball occupies a bigger part of Monica’s heart, and the movie finds the perfect solution. — PD

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Italian director Luca Guadagnino (“I Am Love”) turned André Aciman’s ecstatic, wildly overwritten novel of a formative first love between teenage Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his father’s slightly older — but still relatively inexperienced — teaching assistant, Oliver (Armie Hammer), into a sensual summer dream. There’s an intensity to the sights, sensations and emotions that imprints itself on audiences, such that Elio’s memories become our own. One needn’t be gay to recognize the significance that such an all-consuming early infatuation can leave on a young person’s romantic identity, though the movie offers a welcome message to all who’ve struggled to come to terms with their own sexuality in the eloquent heart-to-heart between the boy and his surprisingly understanding dad: “How you live your life is your business. Just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once,” he says. “Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt.” — PD

Vertigo (1958)

For a director who was known as the thrillingly precise and methodical Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock was not shy about portraying romantic rapture. A number of his films (“To Catch a Thief,” “Notorious,” “Rear Window”) are entrancing love stories, but in “Vertigo” he dove deep into an almost private zone of love-as-fetishistic-obsession. James Stewart’s middle-aged detective falls for the woman he’s hired to follow — played, with a depressive carnality, by Kim Novak, who also plays the woman’s shop-girl look-alike, who Stewart then feels compelled to transform into the first woman. No classic Hollywood movie balances love on the precipice of kink and danger the way this one does, which is why “Vertigo” opened the door to everything from “Blue Velvet” to the career of Brian De Palma. — OG

La La Land (2016)

Damien Chazelle’s glorious, heartrending, bittersweet musical does an extraordinary job of retro-fitting the song-and-dance pleasures of vintage Hollywood into the sunlit freeway landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Yet the film’s most radical feature is the way it brings Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, together with Seb (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist drowning in his own purity, and celebrates their union with intoxicating affection — only to show you how their love crashes on the shores of warring egos. What lifts “La La Land” into the realm of transcendently moving love stories is that it presents a happy ending that almost happened, and that could have happened if only life had turned out a bit different. — OG

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Dramatically speaking, the most exciting part of a relationship occurs either during the time a couple is falling in love or else at the moment it’s falling apart. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman incorporates both aspects — albeit as endangered flashbacks — while exploring a fantasy that anyone who’s been through the emotional wringer of a relationship can identify with: What if you could erase all traces of an ex from your memory? Director Michel Gondry proved the perfect partner to visualize the sketchy sci-fi apparatus that makes a brain scrub possible for Joel (Jim Carrey), who realizes halfway through that, however painful, he can’t live without any trace of his soulmate, Clementine (Kate Winslet), the manic free spirit with the Kool-Aid-colored hair. As Joel tries to hold on to the good times while his mind’s being wiped, Kaufman allows audiences to absorb their best memories and make them our own. — PD

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Hugh Grant stammered his way into our hearts, fumbling and fluttering his eyelids the whole way, in a delightfully English rom-com from screenwriter Richard Curtis (who juggled no fewer than eight couples in his 2003 directorial debut “Love Actually”). This more streamlined love story starts where practically every Jane Austen story ends: at the altar. Grant’s not the one getting hitched at those opening nuptials, though he does fall hard for an American guest played by Andie MacDowell. Their courtship is unconventional (it amounts to shagging anytime their friends tie the knot), but the chemistry is undeniable. When it’s time for Charles and Carrie to get married, however, each of them says their vows with someone else. So how do they wind up together? It’s the little surprises that delight. — PD

Out of Sight (1998)

In terms of sheer sex appeal, it’s hard to top the chemistry between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, who play an incorrigible bank robber and the U.S Marshall tasked with apprehending him in Steven Soderbergh’s sultry, time-skipping Elmore Leonard adaptation. It’s steamy from the start, as a prison break leaves cop and quarry stuffed in a trunk together — a cozy way to get acquainted. Four years after “Pulp Fiction,” the picture came at a moment when Soderbergh was experimenting with film editing and features several nifty innovations, including an unconventional love scene that turns up the heat by cutting between flirtation and payoff. In one thread, Jack Foley and Karen Sisco roleplay in the hotel bar, pretending to be strangers. Skipping ahead, it teases glimpses of the “time out” where all this cocktail talk is headed: a striptease upstairs, in which the pair put aside their differences long enough to make love. — PD

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)

Great as he is, we don’t tend of think of Daniel Day-Lewis as an overwhelmingly romantic movie star. In Philip Kaufman’s heady, intoxicating, high-wire adaptation of the Milan Kundera novel, he plays Tomas, a character who is very much a fickle Lothario — a randy physician in 1960s Prague who bounces from one conquest to the next, though he does have a regular thing going with Sabine (Lena Olin), an artist who likes to spice their lovemaking with mirrors and bowler hats. But then Tomas meets Tereza (Juliette Binoche), whose gravity pulls him down to earth. And then the Soviet tanks come rolling in, blowing up all their lives. When that happens, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” becomes one of the most seriously moving love stories in cinema, a tale of three lost souls yearning to connect, to survive, to unlock love’s mystery. — OG

A Star Is Born (1954)

For 30 years, the Judy Garland/James Mason version of “A Star Is Born” was tainted by the messy circumstances of its making. The script kept getting rewritten, Garland was a notoriously unstable presence on set, and when the movie premiered in New York, it was three hours long — but executives at Warner Bros. then chopped it by half an hour, without so much as consulting the director, George Cukor. Yet when the movie was re-released in the ’80s, its reputation was elevated in a way that’s comparable to what happened with Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” A world of moviegoers discovered that Cukor had crafted one of the most darkly entrancing love stories ever made. Its haunted spirit of rapture and loss is incarnated in Garland’s performance of “The Man That Got Away,” in Mason’s jaw-dropping drunken slap of Garland during a scene set at the Oscars, and in the tragic finale, which touches the secret heart of love: the faith necessary to sustain it. — OG

The Remains of the Day (1993)

Repression and strict social restraints are constantly keeping lovers apart in the works of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who together made a career’s worth of exquisitely nuanced literary adaptations frequently (and often unfairly) lumped in with lesser, made-for-TV costume dramas. While “A Room with a View” and “Maurice” are more overtly passionate, the trio’s take on Kazuo Ishiguro’s celebrated novel offers a heartbreaking portrayal of a couple kept apart by codes beyond their control. In this case, a butler (Anthony Hopkins) born and raised to serve the English aristocracy is so mindful of his place that he can’t bring himself to tell the housekeeper he adores (Emma Thompson) his true feelings. It’s wrenching to watch this docile attendant struggle between emotions for a colleague and devotion to his job, and yet, between the lines, and in these two masterful performances, are written volumes. — PD

Sid and Nancy (1986)

The director Alex Cox brought off something singularly audacious by centering a punk biopic on Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols’ bassist and all-around showman-fuckup who was so dissolute most of the time that he could barely play his instrument or keep from nodding out. Yet the ultimate audacity of Cox’s film is that it dares to present Vicious’s relationship with Nancy Spungen, the torn-fishnet groupie from suburban Pennsylvania who turned him into a heroin addict, as if they were the Tristan and Isolde of the rock ‘n’ roll gutter. As Sid, Gary Oldman gives what may still be his greatest performance, and Chloe Webb, as Nancy, gives what is simply one of the most powerful performances in the history of cinema. Her Nancy is a caterwauling liar and junkie, such a damaged shard of a human being that it tears your heart apart just to behold her. Nancy and Sid are barely functional narcissist addicts, yet their love affair is fused on an animal level; they need each other to live, and to die. “Sid and Nancy” is raw and exhilarating — the greatest of all music biopics, and (not so incidentally) the most romantic. — OG

Moonlight (2016)

Told through poetic glimpses over three separate chapters in the life of its main character, “Moonlight” doesn’t feel like a love story at first. Director Barry Jenkins introduces Chiron at age 10, too young to recognize his own homosexuality, and yet already being teased as soft by his peers. In the middle segment, the boy meets Kevin, with whom he starts to explore his feelings, only to have that possibility derailed by bullying. Subverting stereotypes at every turn, the movie gives this lost soul a second chance in the final stretch, focusing on a tender, tentative reunion between Chiron (bulked up and thick-skinned from his time in prison) and his former crush. By this point, audiences are so invested in the character that “Moonlight” broke free of the rigid box that confines most queer stories to LGBT audiences, making it a crossover success and historic Oscar winner. — PD

The Apartment (1960)

The dialogue still zings and the heartbreak still stings in Billy Wilder’s ahead-of-its-time depiction of two Manhattan office drones who are both exploited by the same manager: Jack Lemmon plays ultra-cynical insurance salesman Bud Baxter, while Shirley MacLaine is Fran Kubelik, the elevator girl who brightens his days … but loves his boss. The plot (which involves Bud lending his place to higher-ups to schtup their secretaries) anticipates the #MeToo movement, while also acknowledging the reality that well-intentioned workers frequently fall for their colleagues. Bud goes about it the relatively respectful way, while Fran’s plight illustrates how unfair the world can be to those who mix business and pleasure. For audiences that love “Mad Men,” but identify with the underdog, the movie poses a wonderfully adult conundrum — one which forces Bud to decide between personal ethics and professional ambition, knowing it could all go sideways for him, career-wise. — PD

An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

In the New Hollywood ’70s, a great many aspects of classic big-screen romance — the unabashed yearning, the sparkle, the lock-step gender roles — began to fall by the wayside. There was a lot of chatter about how romance itself was fading out of the culture. But that’s part of what made “An Officer and a Gentleman” loom so large. In its meticulous throwback of a story about a drifter, played with pinpoint narcissistic glamour by Richard Gere, who enlists in the Navy and falls for one of the “Puget Sound Debs” (Debra Winger) who want to marry a future jet pilot, the movie seemed to bring back, for the post-feminist era, the kind of shamelessly ardent love story that had fallen out of fashion. It helped that director Taylor Hackford infused it all with a contempo grittiness. As a basic-training movie, “Officer” anticipated much of ”Full Metal Jacket,” but what makes it indelible is the hungry desire enacted by Debra Winger, whose gaze of soulful adoration brings Gere fully alive as a romantic actor. — OG

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Cinema could hardly conjure a more lovely or elegant couple than cigarette-smoking Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who floats through stairwells in form-fitting cheongsams. Operating on the wisp of a plot, improvised and evolved over nearly a year, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai denies these two beautiful avatars a conventional romance. They play neighbors who discover that their spouses are having an affair, and rather than sink to the same level, they indulge in a bit of imaginative detective work, reenacting how their partners might have met. This thin outline leaves near-infinite room for Wong to evoke a subjective range of responses from his audience, using the full range of cinematic tools — color, costume, gesture, music — to solicit a different reading from each viewer. Your mileage may vary, but keep in mind: Wong’s a feel-maker as much as a filmmaker, rewriting the rules via this elliptical dance between unrequited lovers. — PD

Moonstruck (1987)

At early test screenings, audiences weren’t falling for Norman Jewison’s now-classic New York romance the way they were supposed to, until he laid the tune “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie…” over the opening credits. Cher tamped down her natural glamour to embody pragmatic Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini, who’s ready to settle for Johnny’s (Danny Aiello) passionless marriage proposal when she meets his brother Ronnie, played by a hot-blooded Nicolas Cage. Let’s just say, Ronnie gives this sensible Catholic woman reason to go to confession. The script by John Patrick Shanley is all but bursting with culturally specific detail, from drool-worthy dishes to unusual superstitions, but it’s the colorful ensemble — family members who want what’s best for Loretta — that ultimately serves to validate her seemingly reckless choice. After a lifetime of listening to her head, she finally decides to follow her heart. That’s amore! — PD

City Lights (1931)

Charlie Chaplin stubbornly resisted the film industry’s embrace of sound, releasing this silent treasure into a sea of talkies. Cinema may have gone a different direction, but his stubborn adherence to pantomime (plus his obsessive need to reshoot every shot until perfect) makes this love story seem all the more timeless, as Chaplin’s signature character, the Tramp, falls for a blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill). She mistakes him for a wealthy man, and the Tramp allows her to go on imagining him that way in the most poetic version of a familiar rom-com trope ever committed to film: At some point, he’ll have to come clean. Will she still love him when she discovers the truth? The final scene, in which she recognizes the vulnerable fool after her vision has been restored, not by sight but by contact, ranks among the medium’s most romantic. — PD

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Of the many qualities that made it a revolutionary movie, two stand above all others. The first, and most talked about, is how violent it was — the bystander shot through the eye, the climactic slow-motion blood ballet, and everything else that rubbed the audience’s nose in what being a criminal really meant. But the other quality that defined “Bonnie and Clyde” was how shockingly sultry and romantic it was. The ads for the movie said, “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people.” The subtext was that something in the connection between Faye Dunaway’s torrid hunger and Warren Beatty’s vulnerable stud glamour was itself so dangerous that it was lethal. Just check out the two stars’ faces as they exchange one last look before being strafed to death by a hail of bullets. That look is the essence of true love. — OG

The 'Before' Trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013)

Taken by itself, 1995’s “Before Sunrise” represents the perfect encapsulation of young love: Two strangers meet on a train, get off together in Vienna and spend the night walking and talking (there’s some debate as to whether they make love, as the movie’s too modest to show it). Nine years later, director Richard Linklater delivered one of the most satisfying sequels of all time in “Before Sunset,” reuniting with his two characters, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), in Paris. Their time is once again limited, but now, the conversation deals with their regrets. But the attraction remains, and the movie ends with the implication they wind up together. But is it happily ever after? Linklater and company caught up with the pair once again with “Before Midnight,” and the movie finds them together, but dissatisfied, acknowledging the challenges that confront couples after nearly a decade together. It was impossible to guess when they first met how deep this relationship would go, and still anybody’s guess how it will end. — PD

Annie Hall (1977)

“I lurve you,” says Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer, coming about as close as he can to declaring his feelings for Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), the beguiling thrift-shop space cadet who charmed the world with her la-di-da innocence. Allen’s late-’70s classic was, at the time, a new kind of love story — the saga of a “relationship,” which is to say a partnership not truly built to last. And maybe Alvy Singer had to say “lurve” instead of “love” because, deep down, he wasn’t really sure that he could commit himself to the L-word. Yet the magic of “Annie Hall” is that is channeled how an entire generation had come to regard love in the age of therapeutic navel-gazing: as something intoxicating yet transient, rooted in a seems-like-old-times nostalgia that felt more at home looking back than forward. — OG

Jerry Maguire (1996)

Tom Cruise had always been a solo vessel — a cruise missile of a movie star. It was Cameron Crowe’s inspiration, in casting Cruise as a sports agent who gets tossed out of the game and has to reinvent himself as a better person in order to come back, to pair Cruise with Renée Zellweger, an unknown actor who did not come off like some female-movie-star equivalent of Tom Cruise. She had a homespun allure that seemed to be calling his cockiness, his very stardom, on the carpet. The beauty of the line “You complete me” is that Cruise seemed, at last, to be letting down the guard of a dozen years of mega-stardom. The beauty of “You had me at hello” is that it reminds us of how easy love is when it’s real. — OG

Roman Holiday (1953)

Audrey Hepburn plays the fed-up crown princess of an unspecified country in this escapist romp through the Eternal City. The project kicked off a seven-picture run with Paramount, during which she may as well have been the queen of Hollywood romances: “Sabrina,” “Funny Face,” “My Fair Lady” and more. Suffocating under the obligations of her position, she sneaks out during a European tour, landing in the hands of Gregory Peck’s dishonest (yet honorable) American newspaperman. He thinks he’s hit the jackpot, betting his editor he can deliver an exclusive interview with the princess — but he doesn’t gamble on falling for the dame. Their whirlwind romance lasts but a day, but in that time, the reporter gives Ann/Anya/Audrey a taste of freedom. She plays it coy for most of the movie, but the closeup on her face at the end says it all. — PD

Gone with the Wind (1939)

The scene where Clark Gable carries Vivien Leigh up the stairs, with intimations of (to put it mildly) erotic coercion, would not pass muster today. Yet that scene, and others that rhyme with it, are part of what make the most epic of Old Hollywood love stories one of the most darkly complicated and enthralling of Old Hollywood love stories. Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara is fierce, strong, manipulative — the Southern belle as aristocratic vixen — and so she and Rhett Butler are destined to turn love into a battle that’s doomed to end in a draw. But what heat and light their fireworks give off! “Gone with the Wind” is a movie that’s now seen as “problematic,” yet one of the most seemingly imperfect things about it — the alternating currents of sex and anger, devotion and contempt that fuel the central relationship — is what makes it such a tumultuous classic. — OG

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

A couple needn’t end up together for a love story to stand the test of time. In the case of Jacques Demy’s bittersweet musical, there’s a relatable quality to the way circumstances keep a working-class French couple from their happily ever after. That downbeat fate serves to balance the bright colors and bold choice of delivering every line of dialogue, no matter how banal, through song. That recitative strategy is common enough in opera, but downright revolutionary on film, still fresh and highly unusual all these years later. Naive young Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve, doll-like at 19) sells umbrellas in the family shop. Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) fixes cars at a nearby garage. They seem destined to be together, until military service calls him away. Michel Legrand’s score leans into the melancholy what might have been in what feels like a snow globe rendering of real life. — PD

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

It’s a queer love story set entirely in the closet. Yet by dramatizing the inner lives of two cowboys who find a romantic home on the range in early 1960s Wyoming, Ang Lee’s breathtaking adaptation of the Annie Proulx short story undermined every expectation of contemporary audiences. In showing us two men who discover a love that they themselves think is forbidden, the film dramatizes how prejudice can worm its way into the very fabric of people’s lives; it also demonstrates that the myth of the straight-as-an-arrow American macho he-man is just that – a myth. At the same time, our yearning for Ennis and Jack to make a life for themselves becomes overwhelming in its heartbreak. The performances of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are indelible — and, in Ledger’s case, miraculous, as he turns the muffled, barely articulate Ennis into a living metaphor for a love that cannot speak its name. — OG

Ghost (1990)

It’s a love story, a ghost story, a corporate crime story, a pottery story, and a movie in which Whoopi Goldberg plays the world’s funniest cut-up mystic. But who would have guessed that just four months after “Pretty Woman,” it would be the headiest romantic movie of its year? The director, Jerry Zucker, was a veteran of the “Airplane!” troupe, yet somehow he juggled all these elements to touch a chord of pure fairy-tale rapture, spinning out the story of a New York banker who’s killed by a mugger and returns as a ghost to protect his artist girlfriend. The way Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore bond across the ectoplasmic divide is at once thrilling and moving (true love, it seems, knows no restrictions, from either physics or the spirit world). The film turned the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” into a retro smash, but only because of how it tapped the film’s emotions: intimate, operatic, quavering with devotion. — OG

Brief Encounter (1945)

It all began with a little piece of grit in her eye. Fortunately — or not — for Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a doctor was present to remove the offending particle, and when her vision cleared, there he stood, Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), handsome and kind. The train station where this meeting happens serves as a kind of romantic purgatory, with each locomotive that steams through reminding Laura and Alec of their obligations to their actual partners. But every Thursday, they meet in town, too weak to resist the growing love between them — feelings which the conservative forces of the time could not condone, but which spoke to a human experience too widespread to go ignored. And so David Lean’s slender, achingly honest film has stood for years, staunchly refusing to judge two would-be adulterous souls, letting audiences in on a secret that even their spouses don’t suspect. — PD

A Star Is Born (2018)

It’s a seesawing Hollywood love story that’s been told on the big screen close to half a dozen times, yet never more powerfully or artfully than by Bradley Cooper in his astonishing directorial debut. From the bombastic kitsch of the 1976 Streisand/Kristofferson version, Cooper borrowed the idea of turning the central character into a rock ‘n’ roll star, and his performance as Jackson Maine — a half-deaf drunken burnout, running on fumes, even though he’s able to fool the world into thinking he’s still a rock god — grounds the soap-opera story in something disarmingly earthy and real. When Jackson meets Ally (Lady Gaga), a budding singer-songwriter, and invites her onstage to sing “Shallow,” you will get chills the way few romantic movies have given them to you — and the tremors don’t let up, as the two get on a serpentine roller-coaster of love vs. jealousy, arena rock vs. dance pop, and tragedy slipping into redemption. — OG

Moulin Rouge! (2001)

Baz Luhrmann’s visionary jukebox musical is in love with a lot of things: the look and feel of faux 1890s sound-stage Paris (that nightclub windmill etched in light), the epiphany of pop songs like Elton John’s “Your Song” when they pop up in what should be the wrong place (but then why does it feel so right?). Mostly, though, the film is in love with Christian and Satine, the romantic bohemians played by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, who summon gazes of such doomed longing that the film’s ultimate love affair seems to be with love itself — the unearthly kind, the kind that lives as an impossible dream. — OG

To Catch a Thief (1955)

From “The Awful Truth” to “An Affair to Remember,” Cary Grant enjoyed a two-decade run as Hollywood’s most dapper leading man, romancing everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Ingrid Bergman, sometimes multiple times over. But it was paired with impossibly elegant star (and future princess) Grace Kelly that Grant sparkled brightest, playing a notorious jewel thief who finds Kelly’s wealthy American tourist even more irresistible than her invaluable diamond necklace. Like a well-practiced cat burglar, this sprightly Hitchcock movie tiptoes so lightly it hardly touches the ground, sweeping audiences away to the chicest of locations on the French Riviera. Whether it’s the scene of Kelly’s gems outdazzling a fireworks show (she stands in the shadow while her diamonds glisten in full view of Grant) or the hilltop picnic overlooking Monaco, the vibrant full-color fling gave landlocked Americans a fizzy Mediterranean fantasy featuring the most distinguished couple imaginable. — PD

Titanic (1997)

The swooniest romantic movie of its time, and also the most sublime, James Cameron’s ocean disaster epic is the rare Hollywood blockbuster that achieves a larger-than-life quality. Yet its secret weapon as a love story is the too-often-unacknowledged deftness of its storytelling. As Jack and Rose, the sweethearts from opposite sides of the class divide, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have an effervescent chemistry, yet they’re playing starry-eyed youths caught in a puppy-love fling. The implication is that their union might last just about as long as the Titanic’s voyage — were it not for that fateful iceberg. In “Titanic,” it’s disaster itself that elevates love into something timeless. — OG

Casablanca (1942)

It was often said that in the 20th century, the movies taught people how to fall in love. You certainly know that watching “Casablanca.” In all of cinema, there is no love connection more pure, more impassioned, more haunted by the past, more alive in the present, more complicated by circumstance than the one between Rick (Humphrey Bogart), the expatriate owner of a shady Moroccan nightclub and gambling den, and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), the woman he fell in love with in Paris in 1940, only to be abandoned by her for mysterious reasons. Do they still love each other? The answer to that is as simple as listening to Sam (Dooley Wilson), the saloon pianist, play “As Time Goes By” and hearing that it’s really about how a kiss is just a kiss…for all time. Yet if Michael Curtiz’s ageless Hollywood classic celebrates what love is, it’s also about the deepest level of what love means : not just rapture but sacrifice, devotion to the other, a giving over of oneself to something larger. “Casablanca” remains the ultimate big-screen romance, in part because Bogart and Bergman show us that love is a force within us powerful enough to connect to — and save — the world. — OG

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How-To Geek

The 10 best romantic movies to stream for free in 2023.

Love is free when you stream these great romantic movies.

Read update

We reviewed our guide and found that Carol and It Happened One Night are no longer available, so we've replaced them with two new recommendations.

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The apartment, crazy/beautiful, disobedience, i'm your man, original sin, sliding doors, 13 going on 30.

Romance is in every movie genre, from drama to comedy to action, and you'll find plenty of it on free streaming services. Here are the best movies centered around love and relationships you can stream right now for free and without a subscription.

UPDATE: 5/15/23

In Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning romantic comedy, hapless bachelor C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is so focused on advancing his career by facilitating his bosses' illicit affairs that he neglects his own love life. Baxter provides his apartment to upper-level employees at his company, so they can have a place to meet their mistresses.

Baxter himself pines over one of those mistresses, elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), and they bond over their shared heartbreak and mistreatment, forging a sweet, honest connection. Wilder takes his characters seriously while placing them in a sparkling, clever comedy.

The Apartment is streaming for free with ads on Pluto TV , The Roku Channel , and Tubi , and for free via local libraries on Kanopy .

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Director John Stockwell takes a stylish approach to this cross-class romantic drama, about the relationship between a troubled rich girl (Kirsten Dunst) and a straight-arrow working-class boy (Jay Hernandez). Stockwell showcases lesser-known areas of Los Angeles, grounding the story in a sense of place. The characters subvert and overcome stereotypes, and their connection goes deeper than superficial differences. It's an underrated teen drama that combines slick images with heartfelt emotion.

Crazy/Beautiful is streaming for free via local libraries on Hoopla .

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Love transcends the rigid standards of a strict religious community in Sebastian Lelio's intense, sensual drama. Rachel McAdams plays Esti, a sheltered housewife in an Orthodox Jewish community whose life is changed by the return of her free-spirited childhood friend Ronit (Rachel Weisz). The two women share a primal connection, and the worldly Ronit helps Esti see beyond the limits her husband has set for her. They're able to embrace their love without letting go of their spirituality.

Disobedience is streaming for free via local libraries on Hoopla and Kanopy .

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It sounds like a silly concept: An uptight academic falls in love with the android companion she's meant to be testing out. But director Maria Schrader makes I'm Your Man into an insightful and endearing romance, with Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens perfectly cast as the prototype of the ideal boyfriend.

Stevens and Maren Eggert have a warm rapport as the lonely researcher slowly opens herself to the possibility of real emotional connection with a machine. I'm Your Man gently raises philosophical questions without losing sight of the personal dynamic between the main characters.

I'm Your Man is streaming for free via local libraries on Hoopla and Kanopy .

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Related: The Best Romantic Movies on Netflix in 2023

The central romantic pairing in Moonstruck is kind of ridiculous, but stars Nicolas Cage and Cher have such fantastic chemistry and give such excellent, committed performances that it somehow seems completely natural.

Both Cher and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley deservedly won Oscars for the story of a seemingly practical Brooklyn bookkeeper (Cher) who falls suddenly and passionately in love with an eccentric baker (Cage) who's also her fiancé's brother. It's a warm, funny romance and a loving portrayal of the vibrant Brooklyn Italian-American community.

Moonstruck is streaming for free with ads on Pluto TV , The Roku Channel , and Tubi , and for free via local libraries on Hoopla .

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Stars Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie have never been hotter than in this potboiler adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel. Banderas plays a 19th-century Cuban plantation owner who gets more than he bargained for when he sends for an American mail-order bride (Jolie).

The two characters deceive and betray each other while engaging in sensual, explicit love scenes. Their anger and deviousness fuels their lust, and writer-director Michael Cristofer creates a delightfully overheated soap opera in the guise of a literary period drama.

Original Sin is streaming for free with ads on Pluto TV and Tubi , and for free via local libraries on Hoopla and Kanopy .

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Related: The Best Comedy Movies on Amazon Prime Video in 2023

It's not hard to predict the outcome of the pact made by longtime friends Ben (Jack Quaid) and Alice (Maya Erskine) at the beginning of rom-com Plus One. Faced with the prospect of attending the weddings of numerous friends and acquaintances, they agree to be each other's dates to each event---on a purely platonic level, of course.

Quaid and Erskine have excellent chemistry, and Plus One is funny and poignant as it heads toward its obvious resolution. The filmmakers treat the characters' ambitions and family relationships with as much care as their romance.

Plus One is streaming for free with ads on Tubi and for free via local libraries on Hoopla .

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The dynamic between the main characters in Secretary is certainly unconventional, but at its core the movie is about two people who fulfill each other's deep emotional needs. A demanding lawyer (James Spader) hires a meek woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) as his secretary, and they discover a shared passion for kinky sexual scenarios within the context of their working relationship.

The movie presents a BDSM relationship as loving and supportive, allowing these misunderstood people to finally be their true, honest selves.

Secretary is streaming for free with ads on Freevee , Plex , and Tubi .

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Related: The 10 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Video in 2023

There are two Gwyneth Paltrows for the price of one in alternate-universe dramedy Sliding Doors. Paltrow's character, London publicist Helen Quilley, either does or does not catch her boyfriend cheating on her at the beginning of the movie, and the story follows both narrative threads.

Either way, she seems destined to end up with friendly businessman James (John Hannah). Both versions of Helen are sharp and energetic, and the movie showcases her inner strength and romantic spirit, no matter what kind of situation she finds herself in.

Sliding Doors is streaming for free with ads on Plex , Pluto TV , Shout! Factory TV , Tubi , and  Vudu , and for free via local libraries on Hoopla .

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It may seem a little strange to watch a 13-year-old in a 30-year-old's body fall in love with an actual 30-year-old, but body-switching comedy 13 Going on 30 somehow makes it charming and sweet. Jennifer Garner plays the teenage girl who wakes up as her adult self after making a wish, and Mark Ruffalo plays the grown-up version of the best friend who was always in love with her.

Garner's Jenna learns lessons about maturity and self-esteem while also learning that the dorky guy next door is the one she should have been paying attention to all along.

13 Going on 30 is streaming for free via local libraries on Hoopla .

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Best Romance Movies 2021

This year’s batch of romantic films is an eclectic list of passionate and painful love affairs from every walk of life. Young love ( To All the Boys: Always and Forever ), first crushes ( Licorice Pizza ), and heartbreak ( Undine ) are all represented. The Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci starrer Supernova gave a moving glimpse into how to continue to love while saying goodbye. However, a different LGBTQ tale beat all the competition: Two of Us , the story of two elderly women living in adjoining apartments who have shared a passionate, long-term hidden love affair for decades. Their happy existence is threatened when they can no longer use their secret hallway, and the drama it inflicts will leave you swooning through tears.

The order reflects Tomatometer scores (as of December 31, 2021) after adjustment from our ranking formula, which compensates for variation in the number of reviews when comparing movies or TV shows.

Two of Us (2019) 98%

I'm Your Man (2021) 96%

I Carry You With Me (2020) 97%

Licorice Pizza (2021) 90%

Supernova (2020) 89%

Undine (2020) 89%

Spring Blossom (2020) 93%

Little Fish (2020) 91%

Summer of 85 (2020) 81%

To All the Boys: Always and Forever (2021) 78%

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The 101 most romantic films of all time

Ready for love? We asked over 100 filmmakers, writers and actors to vote for the most romantic movies of all time.

Romance may be dead in the real world, but in cinema, it’ll live forever. Love is simply too elemental of an emotion for filmmakers to ever abandon. If you live on earth, you’ve experienced it. Even if you’ve never, say, robbed a bank with your loved one or stood by your sweetheart as they transformed into a hideous monster, the best romantic films make you understand and sympathise with the decisions of those under love’s spell – because one way or another, we’ve all been there.

There are so many movies about love in all its complications that ranking the greatest of them is a manor challenge. To help us curate this list, we chatted to more than 100 filmmakers, actors and writers, from The Notebook   author Nicholas Sparks to Notting Hill director Richard Curtis to our own Time Out scribes. We even got Miss Piggy to chime in. Whether you prefer comedies or dramas, horror or sci-fi, we’re sure you’ll find the following list of the 101 greatest romantic movies ever speaks to your own heart as well.

Written by  Cath Clarke, Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, Catherine Bray, Trevor Johnston, Andy P Kryza, Guy Lodge, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj & Matthew Singer

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Top Romantic Films

1.  Brief Encounter (1945)

Director:   David Lean

Cast:   Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard

You’d think that Lean’s tale of stiff-upper-lip emotion would be frightfully and unwatchably old-fashioned today. A married woman falls in love with a married man and they do the decent thing. And…? Unlike Casablanca , the future of civilisation isn’t hanging on the outcome. Just the happiness of two families. And not to mince words, they’re an unglamorous pair.

She’s Laura (Johnson), a not especially pretty housewife. He’s Alec (Howard), an earnest doctor. So why do we continue to find Lean’s much-loved classic so unbearably moving? Because it’s still thrilling to watch the continents of emotion beneath Laura and Alec’s icy properness. Celia Johnson is like a silent movie star with her huge eyes, showing so much emotion with barely a rustle of an eyelash.

Adapted from a Noël Coward play, Brief Encounter  is a brilliantly crafted film, beginning with a goodbye in a railway café – the end of an affair that never really was. From there, Lean flashes back to the lovers’ first meeting in the same café. Laura has grit in her eye. Alec gallantly removes it. Later, they run into each other in a restaurant. They have luncheon (this is the 1930s), take a trip to the cinema, drive in the countryside. He borrows a flat for the afternoon for them to meet in, but embarrassment takes over and they don’t make love.

It’s all so very innocent. We listen to her innermost thoughts – as she narrates a kind of an imaginary confession to her sweet but dull husband: ‘I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.’ Laura and Alec know in their heart of hearts that leaving their families and running off together will not make a happy ending. And so they must part. He accepts a job in South Africa. Our hearts stop with the lovers’ when a busybody crashes their last few precious minutes together. Unforgettable.   CC

2.  Casablanca (1942)

Director:   Michael Curtiz

Cast:   Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into his. Humphrey Bogart’s choice between the woman he loves and doing the honourable thing is one of the most wrenching you’ll ever see on screen. Seventy years on, it gets the heart racing every time.

Bogey is Rick, a hard-drinking American in Casablanca, a city full of refugees fleeing the Nazis. Most of them wash up in Rick’s bar, including his great lost love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). With her is a Czech Resistance leader who’s escaped a concentration camp.

Casablanca  is full of famous lines, but my favourite is Rick’s description of himself heartbroken and abandoned on a train platform – ‘a guy standing in the rain with a comical look on his face, because his insides are kicked out.’   CC

3.  In the Mood for Love (2000)

Director:   Wong Kar-Wai

Cast:   Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung

No one understands the ache of love like Wong Kar-Wai, and ‘In the Mood for Love’ is his masterpiece. In 1960s Hong Kong, two of the most glamorous leads ever to grace the screen – Leung and Cheung – move next door to each other. His wife is cheating on him with her husband, and out of this betrayal a friendship develops. Should they have an affair of their own?

Leung, impossibly handsome, is a study in reserved pain. Cheung is unutterably elegant. Honestly, they make the Mad Men  cast look like scruffy students. At the heart of this muggy, sensual story is the feeling that love is a matter of timing – that a moment missed can never be recaptured. And Leung whispering his secret into the ruins of a wall is an exquisite image of pain and yearning.   CC

4.  A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Directors:   Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast:   Kim Hunter, David Niven, Roger Livesey

Trust Powell and Pressburger to find a way of exploring love that is teasing, heartfelt and totally imaginative – while also being timely for an audience recovering from six years of war, separation and strain. When Niven’s pilot plunges to the ground, we enter two worlds: one of them celestial (in monochrome) and one of them real (in colour), although the distinction is in fact much more playful. After narrowly cheating death (or did he?), will Niven remain on Earth with his new love, Hunter? Or must he succumb to fate? In the end, Powell and Pressburger’s idea is age-old and simple: love conquers all. But they explain this with the bonkers-brilliant concept of putting this idea on trial in no less than a heavenly court. The climax couldn’t be more stirring.   DC

5.  Annie Hall (1977)

Director:   Woody Allen

Cast:   Diane Keaton, Woody Allen

Irrational, crazy and absurd, Annie Hall  gives us love in its all its messy glory. It’s the anatomy of break-up. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ asks Woody Allen’s neurotic comedian Alvy Singer after his split from scatterbrain singer Annie (Diane Keaton, enjoying a killer fashion moment in boyish slacks and a fedora).

Allen has said that ‘Annie Hall’ was his first film to go ‘deeper’. And at its heart is the sad message that finding your soulmate doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Or, as an old woman tells Alvy: ‘Love fades.’ But for all that, Annie Hall  is hands down the most hilarious film ever made about love, hysterically funny and packed with gags.   CC

6.  Harold and Maude (1971)

Director:   Hal Ashby

Cast:   Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort

The hippy era was full of movies that attempted to confront square society, to shock viewers into some undefined form of action. How many of them are still effective today? But ‘Harold and Maude’, the gentle flipside of the revolutionary dream, is every bit as charming, affecting and surprising as it must have been on its first release.

Partly this is because none of its themes have gone out of date: we still live in a world of empty privilege and rigid hierarchy, petty authority and relentless conformism. So the idea of a teenage boy (Cort) shacking up with a batty old woman (Gordon) is still a challenge to social norms. Best of all, Harold and Maude  is also still devastatingly romantic: a story of soulmates, in the most literal sense.   TH

7.  Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Director:   Ang Lee

Cast:   Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway

Damn, Heath Ledger. Newly plucked from shallow teen-heartthrob-dom, Ledger was just beginning to explore his own remarkable potential when his career was brutally cut short. But between the unhinged mania of The Dark Knight  and his heartbreakingly composed turn here, we get some measure of the possibilities. And Brokeback Mountain  is, at heart, a film about possibilities, and the different ways they’re crushed and crippled by an uncaring world. Ang Lee’s film could so easily have been a polemic, a film painstakingly designed to play on prejudice. Instead it plays mercilessly with the heartstrings – there are few more honest depictions of stifled love in cinema.  TH

8.  The Apartment (1960)

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine

In the span of five years, Billy Wilder made three of the all-time great romantic comedies, but with the third, he upended not just his previous efforts but the genre as a whole. Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot were irreverent for their time, though very much screwball affairs. The Apartment was something else – darker, more scathing, yet also more romantic and perhaps even funnier at the same time. Jack Lemmon is a white-collar pushover lending out his flat to the higher-ups at his office so they can carry out their extramarital trysts. The promise of a promotion keeps him smiling through the inconvenience – until his crush (Shirley MacLaine at maximum cuteness) shows up with his slimebag boss (Fred MacMurray). A deep sadness runs throughout – the plot hinges on a suicide attempt, bold for 1960 – building to a sweet-and-sour conclusion encapsulated by the film’s final line: ‘Shut up and deal.’ MS

9.  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Director:   Michel Gondry

Cast:   Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet

You might see this extraordinary film, a joint career peak for Michel Gondry, writer Charlie Kaufman and its improbably but perfectly matched leads, described in generic DVD catalogues as a romantic comedy. It’s a term that seems wholly unequal to its dizzying conceptual acrobatics, not to mention the profound sadness in its absurdist excavation of post-romantic trauma.

But a rich, tragedy-tinged comedy it is: Kaufman has essentially given a scruffy sci-fi makeover to a Philadelphia Story -style farce of second chances and destiny denied, without letting the film’s beating screwball heart get overly chilled by its wintry New York cool. No longer just the hipster’s choice, it’s become the go-to love story for an entire generation of, to paraphrase Kate Winslet’s Clementine, fucked-up girls – and guys – looking for their own peace of mind.   GL

10.  Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

How lovely it is to see Anderson’s unsettling, unpredictable, completely unique romantic comedy in the top ten. Descending from the emotionally draining dramatic heights of   Magnolia , Anderson micro-sized his world, zooming down to two characters adrift in a dream of love, escaping reality through one another.

Sandler proves definitively that he can act (he’s since proven that he’d rather not, if he can avoid it) as the frustrated-to-the-point-of-mania white-collar warehouse worker who falls – truly, madly, weirdly – for Watson’s fragile jetsetter. The result is a gloriously unhinged and mesmerising film, a window into another world, where gravity isn’t quite as powerful and the regular rules – about romance, family, work, aggression, competition entries – don’t seem to apply.   TH

11.  WALL-E (2008)

Director:   Andrew Stanton

Cast:   Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin

Can a near-silent portrait of a love between two robots, WALL-E and Eve, really be that romantic? Well, Pixar found a way with this daring story of a lonely robot on Earth in 2700, a time when the planet has been abandoned by life and WALL-E has only piles of junk and a copy of Gene Kelly’s Hello, Dolly!  for company. WALL-E is a creaky, awkward creature and when the more sleek, iPod-like Eve turns up in his life, he naturally falls head over heels for her.

The film’s great achievement (if we forget its more boisterous and less successful second half) is that its silence and calm draw us in and allows us to appreciate small gestures and the little things in life. It’s the most touching robot-on-robot relationship since the bickering bromance between C3PO and R2D2.   DC

12.  Gone With the Wind (1939)

Director:   Victor Fleming

Cast:   Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable

Endlessly quoted, referenced and parodied, this Golden Age behemoth is such a vast cultural object that many people forget how purely immersive it is as human drama. The romance between feisty Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara and old-world playboy Rhett Butler is perhaps not as romantic as its reputation suggests (the affair is initiated and finally undone by their shared, steely pride in themselves). But underneath its glorious spectacle, Gone with the Wind  is a surprisingly modern and cynically spiked study of two people who may be too perfect for each other. We shouldn’t want Scarlett and Rhett to work things out a badly as we do, yet we swoon with them at every turn.  GL

13.  I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

Cast:   Wendy Hillier, Roger Livesey

The simplest and most loveable of all Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s collaborations, I Know Where I'm Going!  is the tale of a headstrong English lass (Wendy Hiller), who heads north to marry the laird of a remote Scottish island. When she’s trapped on the mainland by rough seas, she finds herself falling for crotchety naval officer Roger Livesey. Screenwriter Pressburger and director Powell create a wistful world of quiet magic and soulful, folkish romance.  TH

14.  Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

Director:   Max Ophüls

Cast:   Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan

Letter from an Unknown Woman  is about the death of love, a yearning so intense that the heart breaks into pieces. From one point of view, the film has no place on this list: love turns to loss, hope to despair. But, in a way, isn’t unrequited love the purest kind, with none of that dirty reality and compromise getting in the way?

If that’s true, then this might be the most romantic film of all, a story of reckless, undimmed, lifelong passion, against all odds and common sense. It’s the peak of Ophüls’s career as a visual stylist. As the camera swoops and swoons, as the characters waltz and wander through high-ceilinged ballrooms and jangling cafes, it’s impossible not to be drawn, like the heroine, into this dream of impossible infatuation.   TH

15.  Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Director:   Luca Guadagnino

Cast:   Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar

Based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman and with an Oscar-winning screenplay written by James Ivory (yes, of Merchant Ivory heritage), Call Me by Your Name  is more than just a bittersweet meditation on the enduring impact of a summer romance.

Director Luca Guadagnino captures the confusion, simmering lust and crackling tension between precocious and thoughtful 17-year-old Elio (Chalamet) and the allure of the older, magnetic and dashingly handsome Oliver (Hammer). Elio’s obsessive nature and infantile arrogance, as well as his fraught desires, are captured so vividly that, regardless of whether or not you’ve ended up screwing a slightly older man in your parents’ summer house in northern Italy, it still feels oddly recognisable and nostalgic. The stirring monologue delivered by Elio’s father (Stuhlbarg) about the necessity of pain and heartbreak throbs with empathy, as does the film’s final scene of Elio sitting in front of the hearth weeping. It’s a gentle and devastating coming-of-age romance that’ll leave you aching (and ready to book a holiday to Italy).  AK

16.  Wild at Heart (1990)

Director:   David Lynch

Cast:   Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern

No one does romance quite like David Lynch: just think of Sandy and the robins in Blue Velvet , or Henry and the radiator lady in Eraserhead . There are those who write him off as an ironist, but this uniquely intense and unabashed worship of love as an otherworldly, all-consuming and dangerous state of higher consciousness is anything but detached.

Lynch loves love, and he loves lovers, none more so than Sailor and Lula, the star-crossed, whisky-fuelled, sex-crazed, emotionally scarred couple that are the wild heart of his madcap kaleidoscopic road movie. This is all-American love reimagined as a carnival show: brutal and beautiful and completely barmy.   TH

17.  La Belle et la Bête

Director:   Jean Cocteau

Cast:   Jean Marais, Josette Day

The miracle of La Belle et la Bête  is how its tricks are still so magical – even in today’s age of CGI. Director Cocteau was a poet first and foremost and he brings to the traditional Beauty and the Beast  fairy tale pure movie poetry: Belle crying tears of diamonds; the castle lit by disembodied human arms holding up candelabras. It’s unforgettable, although you might side with Greta Garbo on the ending. Legend has it that when she watched La Belle  with Cocteau she cried out at the end, as the curse is lifted and Beast is restored to his princely self: ‘Where is my beautiful Beast?’ Garbo, like Belle, had fallen for the matinee idol Beast – and the smarmy-looking prince left in his place doesn’t quite cut it.   CC

18.  True Romance (1993)

Director:   Tony Scott

Cast:   Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette

There are few more blatant examples of personal wish fulfillment in the movies than Quentin Tarantino’s script for True Romance . A comic store clerk and exploitation movie nerd (hey, write what you know) meets a gorgeous, sweet-natured hooker who immediately falls madly in love with him. They head off on the run, taking in all the sights from Hollywood directors to bloodthirsty gangsters, all the while exchanging dynamic repartee and having great sex.

It’s thanks to Scott’s unwillingness to indulge the script’s excesses that True Romance  works as well as it does: avoiding both smugness and sentiment, this is a breeze of a film, coasting on terrific dialogue, charming performances, pacy plotting and sheer, coke-fuelled joie de vivre. Sure, it’s a teensy bit shallow, but damn it’s entertaining.   TH

19.  Manhattan

Cast:   Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep

There’s so much in Manhattan  that’s familiar from Woody Allen’s other films, not least Woody himself playing a writer, Isaac, with endless hang-ups and a variety of women in his life. Here, those women are his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tracy (Hemingway); another love interest, Mary (Keaton); and his ex-wife, Jill (Streep).

For Woody, romance is fluid, complicated and alive. Yet by far the biggest romance in Manhattan  is Woody’s affair with the city itself. New York is often the backdrop for Woody’s films, but here a sense of place is more important than ever. There are those famous montages of the Manhattan skyline, lent a rare beauty by Gordon Willis’ loving black-and-white photography, and at the film’s climax we see Isaac running through the streets that have shaped him – and Woody Allen – and continue to do so.   DC

20.  L'Atalante (1934)

Director:   Jean Vigo

Cast:   Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, Michel Simon

The French are famed as a romantic nation, but for those of us raised in a more reserved culture, their occasional tendency towards sweaty-crotched Gitane-smoke-in-the-face Gainsbourg-isms can seem a little, well, aggressive. Not so L’Atalante : this is a love story with the lightest touch, managing to be spiritual, sensual, serious and strange all at the same time.

Its 29-year-old director famously died before his debut feature was completed, but there’s more in this one film than most directors manage in a lifetime: more meaning, more emotion, more intensity. Perhaps it’s the out-of-the-past setting – a narrowboat plying the canals of rural France – or the weirdly disconnected central couple, or even the presence of Simon’s crusty, irascible Pere Jules. But something in Vigo’s film is not quite of this earth, and to watch it is the closest we may ever come to experiencing someone else’s dreams.   TH

21.  Sunrise (1927)

Director:   FW Murnau

Cast:   George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

The shift in attitudes over time can make old movies unexpectedly shocking: we expect attitudes to race and gender roles to be different. But Sunrise  is a film in which a man attempts, fairly brutally, to strangle his wife – and yet by the end she (and we) have completely forgiven him.

Murnau’s masterpiece remains one of the most visually impressive films ever shot. And it’s in the disparity between that visual splendor and the intimacy of the central couple that the film’s power lies: as the quote above stresses, this is a film about anyone, and everyone. The sets and actions in the story may be big, Shakespearian, and occasionally unbelievable, but the emotions are close, human, familiar – ‘small’ in the best possible sense.   TH

22.  Les Amants Du Pont Neuf (1991)

Director:   Leos Carax

Cast:   Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf  ( The Lovers on the Bridge ) is Leos Carax's valentine to amour fou, Paris and his then-partner Juliette Binoche. And it's as rapturous and irrational as true love itself. Even the story of its production is something of a romantic tragedy: three years in the making and spiralling wildly over budget as Carax reconstructed Paris’s iconic Pont-Neuf Bridge in the south of France, it's the kind of grand artistic expression that must fail in order to succeed.

The simple love story – between two bohemian bums, one a derelict fire-eater and one a painter losing her eyesight – could be the stuff of silent melodrama, but Carax crams it with sound and colour to the point of delirious sensory ecstasy.   GL

23.  Up

Directors:   Pete Docter, Bob Peterson

Cast:   Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer

While most of the discourse surrounding Pixar’s Up rightly centers on the emotionally transcendent opening moments, the film is so much more than than its heartrending prologue. Though wife Ellie is gone within 15 crushing minutes, she looms over the further adventures of curmudgeonly widower Carl Fredricksen, providing him with the spark needed to see the world in the most unconventional way possible. Carl’s love for Ellie drives the film even in her absence, pushing the old grump to fulfill her earthly wishes and open his hardened heart. In a way, the entirety of Up is a posthumous romance, and by the time Carl finds one last love letter from Ellie written from her deathbed – right before the film pivots to canine-piloted dogfights, no less – viewers will be fully invested in one of family cinema’s most complex, nimbly told love stories. 

24.  Before Sunrise (1995)

Director:   Richard Linklater

Cast:   Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke

Proof that you don’t need a plot to fall in love, Before Sunrise  sees strangers on a train Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet-cute, disembark in Vienna, and dance a verbal tango into the night as the deadline of Jesse’s flight home looms.

You’d say that Delpy and Hawke have never been better were it not for the 2004 sequel Before Sunset , which shows us what happens next, and the 2013 instalment Before Midnight , which revisits the pair as middle age encroaches. A classy antidote to the notion that passion is purely physical, it’s the sporadically articulate philosophising and spiky gender-focused sparring that glues these two chatterboxes together.   CB

25.  When Harry Met Sally… (1989)

Director:   Rob Reiner

Cast:   Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal, Carrie Fisher, Bruno Kirby

The great Nora Ephron’s finest hour as a writer, this examination of the sometimes thin line between platonic and romantic love makes no secret of its debt to Woody Allen – at certain points in Meg Ryan’s outfits are practically identical to Annie Hall’s. Yet Ephron earns the reference point with a script as sagely hilarious as – and arguably more heartfelt than – the Woodster’s best relationship studies, mapping the shifting attitudes and affections of the title characters’ long-term friendship with unfailing wisdom and affection for their foibles. All that, and it has a handful of individual gags for the ages, including – I needn’t even quote it – the one that gave countless men lifelong doubt over their own sexual prowess.  GL

26.  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Director:   Jacques Demy

Cast:   Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo

You'd need to have a sliver of ice lodged in your heart not to be moved by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg  – a musical that has even hardened musical-haters melting into puddles. Not that it’s a musical in the belt-‘em-out tradition. Instead, every word is sung rather than spoken as 17-year-old Geneviève (Deneuve) falls sweetly and madly in love with car mechanic Guy (Castelnuovo).

Umbrellas  is one of the most ravishing films ever made, wrapped in candyfloss colours to match the blush of first love. When Guy is drafted to fight in Algeria, Geneviève is certain she will die of grief. But time passes and Geneviève doesn’t die. Love fades. And that’s the bittersweet message inside this exquisitely sugar-coated pill.   CC

27.  The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

Director:   Clint Eastwood

Cast:   Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, Annie Corley

This classy adaptation of Robert James Waller’s bestseller is Brief Encounter  in another time and another place. It’s mid-‘60s Iowa and Italian housewife Streep, long wedded to a local farmer, starts thinking about the life she could have had when dashing National Geographic photographer Clint turns up to shoot the famed covered bridges nearby.

While the latterday framing device is somewhat clunky, the central middle-aged romance is exquisitely inscribed through tender looks, stolen moments, and much sultry jazz on the radio, building to a wrenchingly bittersweet conclusion that love’s liberating affirmation doesn’t always arrive when circumstances allow it to flourish. ‘This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime’ is the key line, and we believe it. Sigh.   TJ

28.  William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996)

• Action and adventure

Director:   Baz Luhrmann

Cast:   Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes

Baz Luhrmann had some cast-iron source material to work with in the form of Shakespeare’s story – but the Australian writer-director took the playwright’s romantic tragedy to another place entirely with this ultra-modern reworking. At the same, he never lost sight of the essence of Shakespeare’s tale of two young lovers doomed from the first time they lay eyes on each other.

The moment that Romeo (DiCaprio, so young!) and Juliet (Danes, so young too!) meet at a wild fancy-dress party is pure bliss to watch, just as Luhrmann’s staging of the final death scene is almost impossible to bear. There are guns, hip-hop, open-topped cars and characters so larger-than-life that the whole thing now, in retrospect, feels like Tarantino directing a season-finale episode of Dynasty . It’s mad, musical and immensely moving.   DC

29.  Before Sunset (2004)

Nine years after the tantalisingly open ending of   Before Sunrise , Richard Linklater revisits the couple who crackled with such chemistry in 1995 to see where life has taken the thirty-something versions of Jesse and Celine. This time, actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy not only played but also co-wrote their parts, and the result is that rare sequel that betters the original.

Plausibly seasoned by life’s knocks but unwilling to let go of a deeply ingrained romanticism, this Jesse and Celine are older, wiser and – just maybe – more suited to each other. Will they let go and make that leap into love? The question presses harder as the film’s fleeting 80-minute runtime slips past with a resolution apparently no closer.   CB

30.  The African Queen (1951)

Director:   John Huston

Cast:   Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart

We tend to think of movies about old folks shacking up as being a modern phenomenon, as producers pursue the newfangled ‘grey pound’. But it’s really nothing new: in fact, when the original script for The African Queen  was presented to the censors, the busybodies were shocked at the idea of two unmarried persons enjoying a late-in-life romance in the sweaty confines of a rickety old tramp steamer.

The African Queen  is one of the great films about delayed self-discovery: brittle spinster Hepburn’s realisation of her love for crusty, good-hearted layabout Bogart isn’t just believable, it feels completely necessary. Wise, warm, witty, and with just the hint of a sly, subversive twinkle in its eye, The African Queen  is old-school Hollywood at its absolute finest.   TH

31.  Amour (2012)

Director:   Michael Haneke

Cast:   Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Louis Trintignant

The saddest film on this list is Michael Haneke’s portrait of the end of a marriage, as Parisians Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) face the inevitability of parting after almost a lifetime together. But while its central concern may be death, Haneke’s drama isn’t depressing. Amour  is a film about the connections between people, and how those bonds are the thing that makes life worth living. The performances are flawless, the script is razor-sharp and insightful. This might be the perfect heartbreaker.  TH

32.  The English Patient (1996)

Director:   Anthony Minghella

Cast:   Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas

Elaine from Seinfeld ’s rant against The English Patient  essentially destroyed Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-guzzler for a generation of viewers – making it become a byword for lengthy, handsomely sluggish prestige cinema. But watch it again, and you’ll see how undeserved that reputation is. Deftly adapting Michael Ondaatje’s novel of passion, grief and regret at either end of World War II, Minghella translated the novel’s lyrical prose into extra-sensory visual language. It’s the rare screen romance with a vivid sense of touch, of skin caressed, between both Ralph Fiennes’s and Kristin Scott Thomas’s desert lovers, and Juliette Binoche and Naveen Andrews’s worn, disconsolate drifters of war. And whatever Elaine says, that cave tryst and tragic farewell still makes many of us misty all over.  GL

33.  Moonlight (2016)

Director:   Barry Jenkins

Cast:   Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali

The lingering sense of lives left unfulfilled permeates Moonlight , even if the film, directed by Barry Jenkins, does end on a somewhat positive note. Set in a barely recognisable yet unsettlingly realistic Miami, the film’s portrayal of the three stages of main character Chiron’s life, from boyhood to adulthood, thrums with pain, tenderness and understanding. The complexities of his situation and his internal and external crisis of masculinity are sharply matched and cut down by moments of kindness, Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe both deliver heartfelt performances. The burgeoning – and conflicted – relationship between Chiron and  Kevin is the sort of romance that, while filled with strife, is also overrun with possibility. There’s plenty of tough stuff in it, but you can’t help but walk away from this one feeling a bit warm and fuzzy.  AK

34.  Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Director:   Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cast:   Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem

Many of cinema’s most exciting moments come about as a result of unlikely juxtapositions. Who would’ve thought that taking the structure and form of 1950s Hollywood ‘womens’ pictures’ and transplanting them to grim, urban 1970s Germany would result in one of the sweetest, most challenging and emotive romantic films ever made?

Mira plays Emmi, the solitary, spreading middle-aged cleaner who starts an affair with a Moroccan ‘gastarbeiter’ two decades her junior. What’s remarkable about Fassbinder’s film is that he takes these two diametric characters and makes their love completely convincing – not for a second do we wonder why the strapping Ali cares so much for crumbling Emmi, or vice versa.   TH

35.  All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Director:   Douglas Sirk

Cast:   Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson

The swooning Technicolor palette, the pristine costumes and the fairly standard odd-couple romance between a rich widow, Cary (Wyman), and a Thoreau-reading gardener, Ron (Hudson), only serve to make the social commentary in Sirk’s film all the more powerful.

All That Heaven Allows  is a blistering exposé of how society’s attitudes serve to throw cold water on passion and keep our purer romantic instincts in check. Scenes of folk gossiping behind the couple’s backs or predatory men leaping on Cary are shocking and only make us root even more for Cary and Ron’s relationship (even if the film lacks a genuine spark between the pair).

The film proved an inspiration for two later inquiring romances, Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul  and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven , both of which took Sirk’s interest in sexual repression and love-across-the-divide in very different directions.   DC

36.  Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (1960)

Director:   Jean-Luc Godard

Cast:   Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg

As love stories go, Breathless' ('À Bout de Souffle  is not one for the ages. Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing a Parisian wideboy on the run after shooting a cop, and Jean Seberg as the hipster American newspaper girl who unwittingly shelters him, look impossibly beautiful together, smoking Lucky Strikes and debating existentialist theory in bed. But they seem entirely too cool to be in love.

Yet Godard’s groundbreaking New Wave take on the Hollywood B-movie is romantic almost in spite of itself. Its still-youthful jazz rhythms, its fresh exploration of Paris at its most invitingly chic and its sexy bedroom talk are what so many of us want romance to look and feel like. So we’re more than happy to indulge it, like the cinematic equivalent of a dirty weekend.   GL

37.  The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

Director:   Michael Mann

Cast:   Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe

‘I will find you!’ With these words, bellowed to his beloved (Madeleine Stowe) as she’s hauled off by rampaging Native American braves, Daniel Day-Lewis secured his position as the ultimate thinking woman’s crumpet. Michael Mann’s epic frontier romp has battles, scalpings, chases, grand landscapes and very, very long guns. But it’s the soaring central love story that makes the film sing: this is an old-school romance, all lingering glances and bold declarations, petticoats, pouting and heaving machismo. And it’s glorious.  TH

38.  Titanic (1997)

Director:   James Cameron

Cast:   Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio

Few films inspire as much passion as James Cameron’s epic would-be folly. Following a troubled production, when the film finally splashed into cinemas, it became the biggest money-spinner of all time, provoking an ocean of housewives’ tears and one of the biggest Oscar hauls in history. Then the backlash hit, like an iceberg in Arctic waters: wait a second, people pointed out, the dialogue’s godawful, the depiction of social class is farcical, and the romance is just join-the-dots Mills and Boon nonsense.

So which is true? Well, both, to be fair. Titanic  is an incredibly involving experience, especially once the ship hits the berg and all hell breaks loose. Sure, it’s about as intellectually valid as a Jilly Cooper novel, but if you’re looking for a high-concept crowd-pleaser with its heart firmly on its sleeve, they don’t come much bigger, sillier or more enjoyable.   TH

39.  The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Director:   Ernst Lubitsch

Cast:   Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart

You can’t blame a great film for the indignities it spawned. The Shop Around the Corner  was the inspiration behind both Are You Being Served?  and gooey romcom You’ve Got Mail , but that doesn’t dim the brilliance of Lubitsch’s original.

We tend to think of pre-war Hollywood as being a fairly insular, conservative sort of place. But here’s a mainstream comedy set in Hungary (already an Axis collaborator by the time the film was shot), pushing the idea that those benighted Europeans – a world away from middle America – had ordinary lives, loves and values of their own. The performances are perfect, the hate-to-love plotline painstakingly constructed, and the dialogue sparkles like diamonds.   TH

40.  Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Director:   Wes Anderson

Cast:   Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray

Romance isn't the first thing you expect from a Wes Anderson film, but in this delightful 1960s-set tale, the American auteur employs all his usual tricks – hip soundtrack, arch dialogue, super-careful production design – in the service of a story about the chaos and madness of young love.

Sam and Suzy are 12-year-olds on the run. Suzy is precocious and independent; Sam is nerdy and serious. They don't get very far, but a mile's a long way when you're 12, and danger is never far away. What's lovely is how seriously Anderson takes Sam and Suzy's adventure, while also laying on the humour and the irony. By the time the pair steal a smooch on a deserted beach, we're totally smitten.   DC

41.  Dirty Dancing (1987)

Director:   Emile Ardolino

Cast:   Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey

She dreamt of studying the economics of underdeveloped countries and volunteering for the Peace Corps. He just wanted to dance the night away. Until one day she manhandles some watermelons into his backstage area (not a metaphor), and falls in love at first sight.

Filmed at the peak of Patrick Swayze’s handsomeness, with a healthy dollop of none-more-’80s style and a cracking jukebox full of irresistibly catchy numbers, a thousand clip shows would have us remember Dirty Dancing  as something of a minor classic. And, for once, they would be right on the money.   CB

42.  Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Director:   Howard Hawks

Cast:   Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn

Like its bumbling protagonist, Hawks’ archetypal screwball classic went from disaster to darling. The tale of a paleontologist (Grant), a society dame (Hepburn), a snappy terrier and a stray Brazilian leopard, Bringing Up Baby  ran seriously over budget and over schedule thanks to animal misbehaviour coupled with Grant and Hepburn’s inability to stop making each other laugh during takes.

It flopped disastrously on first release: Hawks’ contract with producers RKO was cut short and Hepburn was labeled ‘box office poison’ by a top exec. Two decades later, following a series of successful TV showings, the film was rightly recognised as the pinnacle of the screwball art: no film was ever so fast, so witty and so gorgeously irrational.   TH

43.  Weekend (2011)

Director:   Andrew Haigh

Cast:   Chris New, Tom Cullen

This British film, shot on a shoestring, captures in a lively and fresh style the first throes of attraction, passion and maybe even love between two men, Glen (New) and Russell (Cullen), who meet one night in a bar and spend a couple of days and nights together. They talk, they have sex, they size each other up. Glen is open and chatty, while Russell is more guarded and defensive. Haigh’s film is marked by an immediacy and a sense of tentative exploration that’s rare in depictions of couplings, and by a keen awareness that we project one image on the world and hold another back for ourselves. Not a great deal happens in terms of big events, but the film’s honesty and realism mean that it’s a little film with a lot to say.   DC

44.  Pretty Woman (1990)

Director:   Garry Marshall

Cast:   Richard Gere, Julia Roberts

Roberts offered a very different shot in the arm to prostitutes everywhere with this ludicrous but undeniably charming romantic fantasy about a Hollywood streetwalker who falls for a stinking rich businessman (Gere) after he hires her for a week to be his companion at dinners and evening engagements, in between his epic workload of barking at lawyers.

Sure, the idea of a prostitute who’s as beautiful, clean, happy and glamorous as Roberts is absurd, but then Gere’s portrait of the archetypal 1980s business shark with a core of ice yearning to be melted is just as caricatured as her tart with a heart.

Pretty Woman  is slushy, cheesy and so smoothly crafted that it succeeds as the very definition of romantic escapism. Roberts also has some winning comic moments, including her curtain-call quip to an elderly lady at the opera: ‘It was so good I almost pee’d my pants.’   DC

45.  Lost in Translation (2003)

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cast: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson

Narratively, not much happens in Sofia Coppola’s second feature. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are two lost souls adrift in the neon glow of Tokyo – he’s a washed-up old actor, she’s a twentysomething disillusioned with her newish marriage – who meet, dizzy with jetlag, in the lounge of the hotel where they’re both more or less waylaid. They get drinks. They talk. They sing karaoke. The sexual tension goes unresolved, though it was never throbbing to begin with. Then they part, probably forever. And yet, it feels like a great romance. Coppola does her part by shooting Tokyo as a gauzy, twinkling dreamscape. And Johansson and Murray both have hardly ever been better, communicating the subtle poignancy of their fleeting connection without ever saying it out loud. MS

46.  Ghost (1990)

Director:   Jerry Zucker

Cast:   Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze

By rights, a movie about a dead man trying to have one last shag with his wife before ascending into the light, directed by one-third of the team behind The Naked Gun  and Airplane!  shouldn’t jerk as many tears as this. Initially, screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin freaked out at the idea of Jerry Zucker overseeing his weepy supernatural drama, and somewhat understandably – on paper, it seems like an egregious mismatch of director and material. But having a comedic genius at the helm turns out to be just what the movie needed. Without his leavening influence, the film would’ve likely turned out to be a maudlin eye-roller. Instead, it contains just enough farcical elements to make the romance work, despite its surface absurdity. (Whoopi Goldberg’s Oscar-nominated turn as conniving medium Oda Mae Brown certainly helped, too.) Sure, the sexy pottery scene is one of the most parodied movie moments of the ’90s. But anyone who doesn’t get a little misty when ‘Unchained Melody’ hits the chorus should check for a pulse. MS

47.  West Side Story (1961)

Directors:   Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise

Cast:   Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet  may have made all the tweeners’ hearts melt (and scored a higher place on this list), but the real hep chicks and finger-poppin’ daddies know which version of Shakespeare’s play is the real leader of the pack.

West Side Story  is like no other musical: sure, it’s sappy (‘Mariaaaaaaaaaa’) and slightly ridiculous, but it’s also brazenly political (‘if you’re all white in A-me-ri-ca!’), sneakily self-mocking (‘Hey, I got a social disease!’) and ferociously, aggressively emotional: the operatic finale is a masterclass in three-hanky audience manipulation. Also, the film contains perhaps the single best song ever written for the musical theatre: ‘Somewhere’, the ultimate romantic ballad for trapped and dreaming lovers.   TH

48.  His Girl Friday (1940)

Cast:   Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant

Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the broadway hit The Front Page is the king of fast-talking, dapperly daffy screwball comedies. A hysterical chamber piece, the film unfurls as ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) attempts to leave her high-profile newspaper gig, only to be held hostage by her desire to break one more story… and the shady machinations of her equally verbose editor, Walter (Cary Grant), who also happens to be her ex-husband. 

Hawks brilliantly reworks the source material with some help from screenwriting greats Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, gender-swapping Hildy from a cocksure man to a woman in a male-dominated world. The resulting fireworks between Grant and Russell are almost blinding. The film is a barrage of insults, chaotic turns of phrase, dry wit, and endless patter that shows the depth of the central relationship without taking a breath. Cary and Russell in turn perform their own flirtatious ballet of words, twisting syllables around one another’s delivery in a dance that’s teeming with sexual tension. But it’s in the rare moment that the two shut the hell up and simply share a longing glance that sells the relationship best. These two were made for each other. And for the newsroom. APK

49.  An Affair to Remember (1957)

Director:   Leo McCarey

Cast:   Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning

A playboy (Cary Grant) and a chanteuse (Deborah Kerr) fall in love on a transatlantic liner. Both are already attached but when they dock at New York, they agree to meet at the Empire State Building in six months’ time. Such is the set-up for one of Hollywood’s most imperishable romances, which Leo McCarey first directed in 1939 as Love Affair  (starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne) and remade in 1957 as An Affair to Remember .

There’s another version, 1994’s Love Affair  – a tepid showcase for Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. But as any fan of Sleepless in Seattle  will tell you, the 1957 film is the most enduring, allowing Grant to play simmering passion beneath a debonair exterior, while Kerr suggests fervent yearning behind that reserved front. Hokey? Yes. Manipulative? Certainly. But we defy you not to blub like Meg Ryan.   TJ

50.  Notorious (1946)

Director:   Alfred Hitchcock

Cast:   Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains

A masterpiece? Undoubtedly. But romantic? Only if you’re a bit of a sicko. Hitchcock’s best and most brutal film – except for perhaps Vertigo  – this wartime spy story centres on the efforts of American agent Cary Grant to persuade the daughter of a German operative (Ingrid Bergman) to meet and marry a Nazi boss (Claude Rains) – effectively prostituting herself for a greater cause. Of course, Grant and Bergman fall in love, leading to one of the most twisted, manipulative and unsettling romantic tales in cinema. It does, however, contain perhaps the all-time greatest screen kiss: a two-and-a-half-minute blast of raw eroticism that’ll make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.  TH

51.  Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Director:   Tim Burton

Cast:   Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder

The scariest thing about Burton’s gothic fairy tale is reading the list of actors who were considered for the part of Edward, the man with scissors for hands created by a scientist. The studio insisted Burton meet Tom Cruise (who believed the story needed a ‘happier ending’). Michael Jackson badly wanted the part. Tom Hanks turned it down.

Finally, Burton got his way and cast Johnny Depp, who, like a Camden goth Charlie Chaplin, plays Edward with a dash of slapstick and sad-eyed loneliness (watch Edward’s scissor fingers twitch when he’s nervous). It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Depp and Burton, who’ve made seven films together since. Not such a happy ending for Depp and his co-star and then-girlfriend, Ryder. They split in 1993.   CC

52.  It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Director:   Frank Capra

Cast:   James Stewart, Donna Reed

Frank Capra’s festive favourite covers tragedy, comedy and, yes, romance, as loveable lunk James Stewart meets, woos, marries and starts a family with Donna Reed’s adorable small-town beauty Mary. Their life together has its ups and downs – Stewart does try to throw himself off a bridge, after all. But the film’s honest depiction of marriage as both a gift and a struggle is both honest and unexpectedly romantic. Oh, and their kids are bloody adorable, too – little Zuzu and her petals, especially.  TH

53.  Show Me Love (1998)

Director:   Lukas Moodyson

Cast:   Rebecca Liljeberg, Alexandra Dahlström, Erica Carlson

Romance and social transgression go hand in hand in Lukas Moodysson’s gorgeous and empathetic story of two high-school girls whose love affair scandalises the small Swedish town of Åmal. Concerns about distribution and awards probably explain why the original title – Fucking Åmal  – got changed to the cosier and less confrontational Show Me Love . But in no other area does Moodysson compromise: the emotions are raw, the romance giddy, the truths it exposes impossible to ignore.  TH

54.  The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Director:   George Cukor

Cast:   Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart

Look up ‘fizzy’ in a film dictionary and you’ll find a shot of Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord (no relation to the porn star), the snappy, snippy, self-regarding heroine of Cukor’s magnificent country house comedy.

Taking his cues from Shakespeare (it could comfortably have been retitled Much Ado About a Midsummer Night’s Shrew-Taming ), playwright Philip Barry weaves a tangled web of delicious misunderstandings and deliberate misdemeanours as three mismatched men – sarky but self-improved ex-husband Grant, youthfully exuberant writer Stewart and dull, well-meaning fiancé John Howard – take it in turns to tilt at Hepburn’s hard-nosed heiress. And if there’s a sneaking suspicion at the end that she picked the wrong one – Four Weddings -style – that’s all part of the film’s restless, headspinning charm.   TH

55.  It Happened One Night (1934)

Cast:   Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable

Here it is, ground zero, the birth of the modern romantic comedy. Not that there hadn’t been romances before, some of them fairly amusing. But It Happened One Night  was the one that codified the rules of engagement: mismatched lovers thrown together by circumstance; snappy, off-the-cuff repartee; grand, irrational gestures of devotion; endings so deliriously happy that nothing could ever go wrong again.

It had a troubled production – both Gable and Colbert found the script tasteless – but when the movie picked up all five major Academy Awards, their criticism understandably abated. It’s been endlessly remade (twice in Bollywood alone) and can count both Stalin and Hitler among its celebrity fans. But It Happened One Night  remains the genius genesis moment for the romcom – and Hollywood has never looked back.   TH

56.  An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

Director:   Taylor Hackford

Cast:   Richard Gere, Deborah Winger, Louis Gossett Jr

Star Wars  showed the movie business that audiences were ready for old-fashioned stories in shiny new packaging, and this mega-hit melodrama took a not-dissimilar approach. Old Hollywood might have pictured the local girl trying to keep her   honour   yet win the heart of a dashing navy recruit. Here, Richard Gere hogs the limelight as the would-be flyboy learning to love someone other than himself – while Debra Winger alternates good-girl and bad-girl moves.

It’s far from subtle, but certainly delivers more grit than a payload of weepy master Nicholas Sparks’ adaptations. And the big hit single made the image of uniformed Gere ubiquitous for a while – provided you could get goggle-eyed, windmill-armed vocalist Joe Cocker out of your mind.   TJ

57.  The Way We Were (1973)

Director:   Sydney Pollack

Cast:   Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Bradford Dillman

‘Scattered pictures from the corners of my mind…’ Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyrics and Marvin Hamlisch’s melody proved an Oscar-winning combination, bolstering the already considerable star power which has long made this a mums’ favourite. Barbra Streisand is a bolshy, strident Jewish lefty, Redford a WASP prince out to further his own literary career. They seem like chalk and cheese, but such is the stuff of romantic sagas.

That said, the movie never seems quite sure whether it’s unabashed retro-styled escapism or a serious look at the currents of US politics leading to the cultural strife of the ’50s – though the studio’s slashing cuts to the McCarthy-era footage certainly tip it towards the former. Like the song says, ‘Misty watercolor memories, of the way we were’.   TJ

58.  Past Lives (2023)

• 5 out of 5 stars
• Recommended

Director: Celine Song

Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

There's little more than a chaste kiss between Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), childhood sweethearts in Seoul whose tender bond has somehow held across two decades and several continents. And yet, this wise and poignant relationship drama may be one of the most romantic things we've ever wept in front of. Throw in John Magaro as Nora’s author husband – an intuitive, well-meaning but still quietly wounded presence when Hae Sung comes to visit them in New York – as the third corner of the gentlest love triangle you can imagine, and you have a romance that understands people, the vagaries of their emotions and how irresistible external forces (culture, time, ambition, change) can dilute, but never entirely defy, the powerful feelings we all carry in our hearts. PS.

59.  (500) Days of Summer

Director:   Marc Webb

Cast:   Joseph Gordon Levitt, Zooey Deschanel

A post-modern post-mortem of love – or something like it – (500) Days Of Summer  introduces us to Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a lady since invoked in countless discussions of that stock indie romcom character, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

A trainee architect working as a greetings card writer, Tom falls hard for the kooky charms of his boss’s new secretary, despite the advice of friends who warn him off and Summer herself, who tells him she doesn’t believe in love. Against all the odds, the couple bond over a shared affection for little-known balladeers The Smiths – and the rest is non-linear narrative history.   CB

60.  Gregory's Girl (1981)

Director:   Bill Forsyth

Cast:   John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn, Clare Grogan

Figuring out who we’re in love with is, of course, a key part of the romantic process. Too many films feature lightning-bolt moments, where the rightness of a match is obvious and irrevocable – cue happy ending. So it’s nice that there are a few movies out there saying, well, hang on a minute. Love at first sight is all very well, but isn’t that a rather shallow and reckless way to select a mate?

Gregory’s Girl  starts with the lightning bolt – gangly Glaswegian Gregory spots leggy keepy-uppy expert Dorothy (Hepburn) – then patiently explains why, for someone as irrational and irregular as Gregory, that kind of perfect love probably won’t work. So why not try someone a little closer to home? The result is pragmatic, sure, but that doesn’t make it any less romantic.   TH

61.  The Crucified Lovers (1954)

Director:   Kenji Mizoguchi

Cast:   Kazuo Hasegawa, Kyôko Kagawa

Adapted from an ancient Japanese fable, Chikamatsu Monogotari  sees master director Kenji Mizoguchi prove his worth alongside the likes of Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy as an all-time master of the populist romantic tragedy. It’s the tale of a simple clerk, Mohei (Hasegawa), who does a slightly crooked but well-meant favour for the boss’s wife, Osan (Kagawa), and, in the ensuing fallout, is forced to go on the run with her, accused of adultery, for which the penalty in seventeenth-century Japan was public crucifixion.

So begins a thrilling, devastating journey through the hinterland, as the forces of propriety and tradition band together to frustrate the lovers’ happiness. Unabashedly sentimental but rich with meaning and subtle purpose, Mizoguchi’s film teaches us that one moment of reckless love is worth more than a lifetime of socially approved loneliness.   TH

62.  Jules et Jim (1962)

Director:   François Truffaut

Cast:   Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre

Truffaut’s freewheeling tale of a menage à trois burns as brightly today as it did in 1962, tripping along on playful New Wave energy. Moreau is unforgettable as force of nature Catherine, who steals the hearts of two young writers in 1910s Paris. Catherine is Jules’s girl. She’s not beautiful or intelligent, but she is a real woman, he says. The three skip around Paris together. Life’s a holiday.

One night, as the two men spout nonsense about a Strindberg play, Catherine hurls herself into the Seine. She’s unpredictable like that. Later, when she switches allegiances to Jim, Jules can’t bear to be apart from her. Let Jim have her, but let her stay in his life. The years can’t dim the warmth or humanity of Truffaut’s third (and best) film.   CC

63.  The Graduate (1967)

Director:   Mike Nichols

Cast:   Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross

How romantic is The Graduate , really? Are we talking about the affair between Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) and Mrs Robinson (Bancroft), in which he’s driven by adolescent lust and gnawing boredom, and she by a desperate desire to revisit her youth, to feel something, anything for a change? Or do we mean the engagement between Benjamin and Mrs Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Ross), in which both characters appear to be marching through some sort of societally mandated courtship routine, without ever really meeting in the middle?

And yet, despite the cynicism and the ironic distance, despite that frankly terrifying closing shot of Ben and Elaine on the bus, miles distant, there’s still something bracing and heartfelt about The Graduate . Perhaps in showing us all this tragic emptiness, Nichols is encouraging us to confront it.   TH

64.  Betty Blue (1986)

Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix

Cast:   Béatrice Dalle, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Gérard Darmon

Amour fou: the French invented the term and this shows you why. In her very first movie, the 21-year-old Béatrice Dalle delivered a career-defining performance which transcends mere pouting petulance to embody a wide-eyed, crockery-smashing, blade-wielding, bush-flashing rage to live. Struggling writer Anglade does his best to provide the unconditional affection she craves, but will anything be enough to quieten Betty’s inner torment?

Quintessentially French, quintessentially ’80s, as Diva  auteur Beineix revels in an eye-popping palette of electric blues, neon yellows and lipstick crimson. Tellingly, it’s best experienced in the deliriously grandiloquent 186-minute director’s cut rather than the more familiar but deeply compromised two-hour release version, which struggles to make sense of Betty’s extreme psychology.   TJ

65.  Moulin Rouge! (2001)

Cast:   Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor

‘You’d think people would have had enough of silly love songs,’ Ewan McGregor sings in the centrepiece medley of this gloriously exploded pop musical, but director Baz Luhrmann looks around him and sees it ain’t so. More love songs! More sequins! More dancers! More everything! A paean to excess in every department from emotion to interior decoration,  Moulin Rouge! (never forget the exclamation mark) understandably drives a lot of viewers dilly. But in the wild postmodern glitter-wash it applies to a slender boy-meets-courtesan trifle, Luhrmann’s film brilliantly evokes the intense, irrational, head-over-everything rush of true passion. Its best moments – the immortal star entrance of Nicole Kidman on a spangled trapeze, for example – are dizzy gasps of pure cinema.  TH

66.  Wings of Desire (1987)

Director:   Wim Wenders

Cast:   Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin

Long before his face became part of a thousand ‘Downfall’ memes on Youtube, Bruno Ganz played an angel in love with a mortal trapeze artist in West Berlin, in Wim Wenders’s romantic metaphysical fantasy. Employing a similar coded combination of colour and black and white to Powell and Pressburger's ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, the celestial perspective is purer but more remote, asking us to consider the appeal of everyday humanity from the outsiders' point of view.

Check out the loose Nicolas Cage remake City of Angels  if you'd like to see a Hollywood spin on the same big questions (‘Never date a man who knows more about your vagina than you do.’).   CB

67.  Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Directors:   Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

Cast:   Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen

The story of the transition from silent movies to the 'talkies' has created a sub-genre all of its own, including movies from Sunset Blvd  (1950) to The Artist  (2011). Here, it's a light-hearted affair set in the late 1920s as silent star Don Lockwood (Kelly) bumps into Kathy Selden (Reynolds), a chorus girl, when he leaps into her car and she pretends to be a serious actress.

It's a classic case of chilly antagonism thawing into true love as Don and Kathy finally fall for each other and become colleagues when his studio wants to make a talking picture and she has to step in to replace the unappealing voice of movie star Lina Lamont (Hagen). But more famous than any romance, surely, is the opening-credits song-and-dance sequence of Kelly and co performing the title tune?   DC

68.  Bright Star (2009)

Director:   Jane Campion

Cast:   Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw

The lives of great romantic artists don’t always make for great romantic cinema; in the case of poet John Keats, living up to his words is a tall order for any filmmaker. But Jane Campion’s wondrous, petal-delicate film not only finds a shimmering visual language that’s wholly in sympathy with the great man’s turn of phrase, but applies his poetry in a real-world context that never feels too precious or contrived. Keats’s feyness is counteracted by the headstrong candour of Fanny Brawne, the young seamstress who became his great love, played beautifully by Abbie Cornish. Campion traces their romance as one of opposing, complementary sensibilities and a tragically shared vulnerability. By the end, the sonnet referenced by the title becomes a tear-inducing expression of grief.  GL

69.  Head-On (2004)

Director:   Fatih Akin

Cast:   Birol Ünel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck

Judging by his ravaged-rocker looks, Turkish-born, Hamburg-resident Birol Ünel is heading for oblivion by the scenic route – drink, drugs, sex, argy-bargy – and that’s before he drives his car head-on into a wall. The last thing he needs while recovering in a psychiatric unit is an offer of marriage from fellow patient Sibel Kekilli, another Turkish-German misfit of equally volatile temperament.

The mayhem which follows has a lot to say about the travails of growing up between two cultures – one ultra-liberal, the other repressive – but amid all the rage, blood and aggro of a truly headbanging storyline, there’s a profoundly moving recognition of the power of love to bring meaning and commitment where previously only existed substance-fuelled nihilism. A stone-cold modern classic.   TJ

70.  Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020)

Director : Céline Sciamma

Cast : Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel

Girlhood  director Céline Sciamma delivers a gorgeous love story that lays bare the desires of two young women in a cold and unforgiving social climate in the eighteenth century. Backdropped by a rugged, windswept Breton landscape, it’s a masterpiece of quiet passions that has the taste of sea salt on its lips and fire in its eyes. AS

71.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)

Director:   Philip Kaufman

Cast:   Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin

Some of the greatest love stories hinge on denial rather than devotion. Philip Kaufman's shiveringly erotic adaptation of Milan Kundera's 1968-set novel – which many thought too tangled up in its characters’ psychologies to be filmed at all – is remarkable for the romance it builds around a man with no desire to be in love.

Daniel Day-Lewis is ideally cast as Tomas, a young Czech surgeon whose pursuit of an emotion-free sex life is fostered and challenged, respectively, by Lena Olin's uptown artist and Juliette Binoche's sincerely adoring country waif. Between and beyond this brittle love triangle are some of the sexiest sex scenes ever put to celluloid, as the Prague Spring withers and the true cost of free love is learned.   GL

72.  The Notebook (2004)

Director:   Nick Cassavetes

Cast:   Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams

The, er, literary oeuvre of Nicholas Sparks has been churned into an awful lot of insipid Hollywood schlock – nobody past puberty got misty-eyed over Miley Cyrus in The Last Song , and surely no one of any age remembers Kevin Costner in Message in a Bottle .

On the face of it, it’s hard to say why the aggressively sentimental The Notebook  is any different. But there’s something so earnest about the way this star-crossed teen romance – he’s a common country boy, she’s a beautiful heiress, you do the math – hits its clichéd marks that the film itself takes on the unassailable, idealistic purity of first love. Magic casting, too: here’s where the world’s love affair with Ryan Gosling started, before he got way too cool for this sort of thing.   GL

73.  Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Director:   David O Russell

Cast:   Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence

You know that moment when you meet someone for the first time and something clicks? Maybe you bond over a mutual hatred of beetroot. Or love the same film? That’s exactly what happens to Pat (Bradley Cooper) and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) in Silver Linings Playbook  – except it’s anti-depressant side effects they bond over.

He’s recovering from a nasty manic episode. She’s been sleeping around since her husband died (‘I'm just the crazy slut with a dead husband!’) As romcoms go, this is awkward and messy, but motors on offbeat energy and a fast-paced wisecracking script. It’s a date movie with a beating heart, a story that believes in love. A happy pill of a film.   CC

74.  City Lights (1931)

Director:   Charlie Chaplin

Cast:   Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill

Essentially one of the first romcoms, as well as an undisputed silent era highlight, City Lights  sees Chaplin’s Little Tramp fall for a blind flower girl and accidentally-on-purpose lead her to believe he’s a millionaire.

Shenanigans ensue, with plenty of the kind of old-timey gags beloved of The Simpsons  and Family Guy  cutaways, some of which have dated, and some of which still seem as fresh as any Frat Pack set piece (a frenetic drunk driving sequence boasts the immortal exchange: ‘Watch your driving!’ ‘Am I driving?’). But it’s the rom more than the com that keeps us coming back to City Lights  – the quite literally touching finale is undiminished.   CB

75.  Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Director:   Mike Newell

Cast:   Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell

Okay, so it didn’t do much to promote a realistic image of London around the world. (No, we don’t all live in enormous mansion flats. No, we don’t all have floppy hair. Yes, we do say ‘fuck’ a lot.) But Richard Curtis’s frightfully well-spoken romcom has charm to burn. Much of that is down to Hugh Grant’s effortless performance as Charles, the loveless fop whose route to a woman’s heart includes quoting The Partridge Family and saying ‘gosh’ a lot. It may take a late-in-the-day lunge into tearjerker territory (the clue’s in the title, folks). But overall this is sweet, witty, endlessly watchable stuff. Oh, and Kristin Scott Thomas is magic.  TH

76.  Holiday (1938)

Cast:   Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Doris Nolan

Bringing Up Baby  and The Philadelphia Story  crop up more frequently in classic movie archives, but George Cukor’s 1938 Holiday  remains cinema’s most sparkling screwball pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Grant plays a self-made professional whose dreamier impulses don’t match the sensible life he’s fashioned for himself; Hepburn is the free-spirited sister of his wealthy, straitlaced fiancée, in whom he finds himself curiously able to confide his most fanciful ambitions. Will chemistry and an instinctive connection triumph over practical planning? Does Grant look good in a sharply cut suit? It’s all in the witty, buoyant execution here, and in the stars’ palpable, infectious enjoyment of each other – the inevitability of their characters’ joint happiness doesn’t make you root any less hard for them.  GL

77.  Once (2006)

Director:   John Carney

Cast:   Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova

It’s one of the great underdog success stories in all of cinema – a low-budget indie-folk musical from an unheralded Irish director, starring two little-known musicians, that ended up getting nominated for an Oscar and spinning off into a popular stage play. Once truly came out of nowhere, but it’s easy to see why everyone fell for it, including its leads, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who briefly became a real-life couple. He’s a busker and part-time vacuum cleaner repairman, she’s an immigrant flower seller, who meet on the streets of Dublin and forge a connection over music and heartbreak. It’s not a whirlwind romance – in fact, it never becomes a full-fledged romance at all. She has a husband back home in the Czech Republic, and he has his eyes on London. But it is a love affair, of the unconsummated sort that plays out in cafes and bus stations and random street corners across the world millions of times a day. It’s never spoken of, but it is sung, in the aching, gorgeously spare music the pair end up recording together. It has the tenor of a fairy tale but the emotional resonance of real life. No wonder it charmed the world. MS.

78.  Splendor in the Grass (1961)

Director:   Elia Kazan

Cast:   Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle

Rural Kansas, 1928, when ‘nice’ girls were supposed to hold out until the wedding night. Every fibre of her being is telling high-schooler Natalie Wood she wants alpha male Warren Beatty right now, but his oil magnate dad has decided she’s too ordinary for marriage. Welcome to a world before contraception, as acclaimed playwright William Inge’s Oscar-winning script puts in place a devastating conflict between fundamental human desires and layers of obfuscating social hypocrisy.

Both in their early twenties at the time, Beatty and Wood make a sensual couple, as director Kazan constructs a pristine vision of Americana, played against a coruscating narrative where yearning slides uncontrollably into hysteria. Wood’s startling performance deserved an Oscar but got only a nomination.   TJ

79.  Amélie (2001)

Director:   Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cast:   Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz

It’s the movie that launched a thousand mini-breaks to Paris. Amélie  charmed the world’s socks off in 2001, a surprise international hit.   Audrey Tautou   is irresistible as lonely waitress Amélie, who discovers her purpose in life: to make other people happy with anonymous acts of kindness.

A whimsical fairytale, it’s filled with playful, funny touches. The best is Amélie standing on a balcony overlooking Montmartre wondering how many people are having an orgasm at this second. The answer is 15 – director Jean-Pierre Jeunet shows them. He originally cast the British actress Emily Watson in the lead. When she quit, he’d all but given up hope of finding his Amélie, until he spotted Tautou on a film poster in the street. Now it’s impossible to imagine any other actress in the role.   CC

80.  Waterloo Bridge (1940)

Director:   Mervyn LeRoy

Cast:   Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor, Virginia Field

The young Vivien Leigh will always be remembered for her indomitable Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind . But she also displayed heartbreaking fragility in this famous version of Robert E Sherwood’s play, an ill-starred romance ’twixt soldier and ballerina set against the chaos of war.

As WWII breaks out, colonel Taylor finds himself on Waterloo Bridge, assailed by memories of his whirlwind love affair in the same city during the Great War. Cue triple-strength schmaltz in the golden-age Hollywood manner as fate comes between the radiant couple, though not before they’ve shared an all-time classic clinch on New Year’s Eve, breathily smooching as lights are extinguished round a darkening dancefloor. Passion and foreboding in potent harmony.   TJ

81.  Beauty and the Beast (1992)

Directors:   Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

Cast:   Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson

No, not Cocteau’s 1946 masterpiece (you’ll find that at   number 17) nor the 2017 live-action remake starring Emma Watson. Rather, Disney’s magical cartoon, made in 1991 but harking back to the studio’s glory days. Unlike the golden oldies, however, this fairy tale features a plucky heroine, Belle, who braves slathering wolves to rescue her dad from the Beast’s terrifying gothic castle.

In fact, the Beast is a young prince turned into a monster for his cruelty by the curse of an enchantress. Only three little words can break the spell. It’s impossible not to be swept along by the gorgeous Broadway-style song and dance numbers and by what one philosopher called the fairy tale’s ‘great message’ – ‘that a thing must be loved before it is lovable’.   CC

82.  Juno (2007)

Director:   Jason Reitman

Cast:   Ellen Page, Michael Cera

On release, first-time scriptwriter Diablo Cody’s Oscar-winning unplanned teen pregnancy comedy Juno  was all-but obscured by one debate: was it a pro-lifer tract deceptively gussied up in indie clothing?

The film’s abortion issues are still up for debate; leaving that aside for a moment, what’s left is a sweetly funny romantic comedy about relationships both teen- and middle-aged, and love of many kinds: parental, romantic and platonic. And sure, the teen-speak might bear about as much resemblance to real teenage slang as the actors in Grease  did to actual teenagers, but Ellen Page and Michael Cera’s performances remain pitch perfect.   CB

83.  Say Anything (1989)

Director:   Cameron Crowe

Cast:   John Cusack, Ione Skye

Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut may be remembered for That Scene With the Ghettoblaster, but there’s so much more to it than moody John Cusack and his synth-scored adolescent angst.

For one, there’s Ione Skye as his posh-kid paramour, who may suffer from occasional dream-girl tendencies but shows enough spark to justify John’s obsession. There’s also a terrific supporting cast including Frasier’s Dad John Mahoney, Joan Cusack, Jeremy Piven and a magnificently brash and spiky Lili Taylor.

But it’s the sweet, thoughtful, zinger-studded script which explains why, for one brief moment, we actually believed that Crowe could be the next Woody Allen, only with more New Wave hair and classic rock references. Oh, what might have been…   TH

84.  Chungking Express (1994)

Cast:   Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin

Wong Kar-Wai’s third feature remains a perennially fresh declaration of his unique aesthetic, where the accretion of voiceover, music cues, faces and places creates an immersive mood more significant than whatever passes for a plot.

In this instance, that involves two sets of would-be lovers – policeman Kaneshiro falls for shady lady Brigitte Lin, while his colleague Leung circles around winsome kebab-stall girl Faye Wong. Still, the idea of actually getting it together is much less headily intoxicating than the sweet ache of a broken heart, or the woozy rush of unconsummated possibility. Meanwhile, Wong’s stop-go camera captures the restless bustle of pre-handover Hong Kong, and the melancholy sway of the original ‘California Dreaming’ sets the seal on an off-hand masterpiece.   TJ

85.  Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

Cast:   Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina

This anarchic romance was made by French New Wave filmmaker Godard at the height of his powers and starred his then-girlfriend Karina and Belmondo, the thick-lipped, brooding star of his earlier Breathless . It foreshadows Bonnie and Clyde  in its story of a beautiful, lawless couple leaving polite society behind and going on the run, from Paris to the Med, pursued by gangsters.

It’s a cluttered burst of colours, ideas and emotions – a frantic essay on real life and movie life that overflows with energy and heady thoughts. It looks and feels like an outlaw romance, with Karina and Belmondo bringing style and attitude to the table, but it’s also a strongly experimental work made by someone determined to shake up cinema and the world. That itself is pretty romantic, no?   DC

86.  Tabu (2012)

Director:   Miguel Gomes

Cast:   Ana Moreira, Carloto Cotta

The title of Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’s woozy monochrome trance of a movie (as well as its chapter headings of Paradise  and Paradise Lost ) is pinched from FW Murnau’s silent epic of star-crossed love in the South Seas. In no other sense, however, is this wistful, structurally intricate evocation of a forbidden affair in Portuguese-occupied Africa in the 1960s – and the ways in which it haunts those involved decades on – like anything you’ve seen before. Gomes blends sharp, post-colonial political perspective with passages of pure, besotted reverie. Glowing, lucid memories of a woman’s romantic history illuminate her far more unloved present. Tabu offers a poignantly literal interpretation of LP Hartley’s assertion that the past is a foreign country. All that, and a weepy Portuguese rendition of ‘Be My Baby’ on the soundtrack.  GL

87.  Badlands (1973)

Director:  Terrence Malick Cast:  Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek

Terrence Malick doesn’t so much make movies as create universes, and Badlands  features perhaps the most enticing of them all. In this world of freedom, adventure and immorality, Holly (Sissy Spacek) and Kit (Martin Sheen) live, love, drive and commit murder. The lovers-on-the-run movie was already a cliché by the time Malick came to shoot his debut feature, but he gave it new life, and refreshed American cinema in the process. As a depiction of suburbia it’s dreamlike and beautifully photographed. As a film about the shock and excitement of first love it’s swooningly romantic and vibrant, and Martin Sheen sure can rock a grimy t-shirt.   TH

88.  Let the Right One In (2008)

Director:   Tomas Alfredson

Cast:   Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson

The warm heart beating at the center of this ice-cold Swedish horror yarn belongs to Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a bullied 12-year-old who finds friendship with a fellow outcast (Lina Leandersson), who just so happens to be a century-old vampire trapped in a pre-teen body. Never mind that it’s likely the killer next door is grooming young Oskar for a life of murderous servitude: To young, lonely Oskar, the affection and companionship he finds in his curious new crush are everything, the only comfort he can find in a frigid world. When the two share moments of tenderness – a trip to a winter fair, a fleetingly joyous dance in a dark apartment — it feels like everything will turn out okay for the pair. It won’t – by the end, the two are fleeing home amid a pile of bodies – but hey, that’s love. APK

89.  Some Like It Hot (1959)

Director:   Billy Wilder

Cast:   Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon

The romance in Some Like It Hot  is very much of the anything-goes, outsider sort. Wilder’s brilliant, high-energy transvestite comedy is a celebration of folk from the other side of the tracks dressed up as a madcap farce in which Curtis and Lemmon spend most of the film disguised as female musicians and on the run from the Chicago mob in 1929. It’s also, of course, a vehicle for Monroe’s beauty, charm and amply-platformed cleavage (seriously, check out her dresses in her two musical numbers).

Most of the fun lies in gender-bending games of mistaken identity that would make Shakespeare proud. But there’s also some real feeling here, both between Curtis and Monroe and, most bizarrely if fleetingly, between Lemmon and an ageing playboy. Delightful and giddy.   DC

90.  La La Land (2016)

Director:   Damien Chazelle

Cast:   Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone

Damien Chazelle’s modern take on the old Hollywood musical definitely serves up a good portion of cheese, but somehow manages to avoid the trappings of other recent movie musicals. It’s a film that, despite people bursting into song and dance at seemingly random moments, feels genuinely natural. The pairing of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as Mia and Sebastian, two creative types trying to cut it in Los Angeles, is electric. Both actors acutely capture the way their character’s own desires, ambitions and passions keep the path of true love far from smooth. Their on-screen chemistry, even when the mood sours, leaves a lingering and haunting memory. Somehow, you feel that these two will find a way back into each other’s lives one day.  AK

91.  Roman Holiday (1953)

Director:   William Wyler

Cast:   Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck

It was the film that made Hepburn an overnight star at the age of 22. She fizzes as tomboyish Princess Ann, who is bored to tears of dreary ambassadors’ balls and hobnobbing with crusty old majors with walrus moustaches.

On a state visit to Rome, Anne slips away to see how the other half live. Peck is the American reporter who can’t believe his luck, picking up a real-life runaway princess. Sure, he tells her, he’ll show her the sights… On the sly he’s cooking up the scoop of the century. Of course they fall in love. Swoon at its near-perfect ending, with its tender message that a moment’s happiness can last you a lifetime.   CC

92.  The Fly (1986)

Director:   David Cronenberg

Cast:   Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis

On the surface, David Cronenberg’s famously icky B-movie remake is about a hubristic scientist mutating into a human-insect hybrid. What makes The Fly more than just a nauseating endurance test, though, is the tragic love story at its core. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis were a real-life couple at the time, and their heady chemistry buoyed the film beyond its gross-out set pieces and sci-fi plotting. If anything about their relationship rang false, the movie could quickly devolve into eye-rolling – albeit disgusting – comedy. As delivered, watching Davis cling to the man she loves as he gradually sheds every last bit of his humanity is as gut-wrenching as it is stomach-turning. It’s body horror that recognises that there is no more monstrous part of the human body than the heart.. You just might want to make sure you know your partner really well before suggesting it as a Valentine’s Day watch. MS

93.  Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Director:   Arthur Penn

Cast:   Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are often cited as poster children for the modern gangster movie, though rather less often as any sort of romantic ideal. Maybe because most good roadtrips tend not to take in bank heists and few good dates end in a hail of bullets. But Arthur Penn’s hand grenade of a movie rings with the kind of erotic charge few out-and-out romances can match, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway summoning a magnetic connection that’s fritzed up to the very last by misunderstanding, anxiety and sexual angst. It makes their bond human, relatable and ultimately, deeply tender. Who wants ideals anyway? PDS

94.  Cyrano de Bergerac (1990)

Director:   Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Cast:   Gerard Depardieu, Anne Brochet

Russia’s most celebrated film talent since Eisenstein – the inimitable Gérard Depardieu – achieved the unusual feat of securing an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a foreign language film for his portrayal of France’s answer to the Elephant Man.

Despite his unconventional looks, Cyrano is a spectacular lover – at least on paper, writing letters that cause sexy cousin Roxane (Anne Brochet) to fall deeply in love with the man from whom she erroneously believes she’s received the billets-doux – the dashing but inarticulate Christian (Vincent Perez). Unlike José Ferrer, who did win the Oscar for his 1950 portrayal of Cyrano, Depardieu didn’t take home the little gold statue in the end, but it’s probably his take on Cyrano that’s become the more iconic.   CB

95.  Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Cast:   Julie Christie, Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin

David Lean’s super-sized epic of love lost and found – several times over – across a half-century of tumultuous Russian history may seem to have fallen slightly out of fashion these days. But you need only have counted the not-so-subtle references to its florid aesthetic in Joe Wright’s recent   Anna Karenina   to see how it captured the imagination of more than one generation. Not for nothing was Maurice Jarre’s swirling ‘Lara’s Theme’ a Top 10 hit in its day, after all.

Still, the lush sound and iconography of Zhivago  – that wedding-cake ice palace, those fashion-spread furs – has rather superceded the knotty, compromised politics of its love story, a cruel triangle in which different viewers may find themselves sympathising with different sides.   GL

96.  The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)

Director:   Steve Kloves

Cast:   Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer, Beau Bridges

Pop culture’s chief takeaway from Steve Kloves’s still-electric directorial debut has been the sight of a never-more-smokin’ Michelle Pfeiffer in a blood-red velvet dress making a grand piano her bitch as she burns through a rendition of ‘Makin’ Whoopee’. And sure, that’s a pretty great takeaway, but it ignores what a smart, sad tale of attraction, ambition and disappointment the whole film is, with a bristling romantic connection between Pfeiffer’s lounge singer and Jeff Bridges’ charismatic manchild pianist. Hollywood missed a trick by never pairing those two again, but then it also hasn’t made the most of Kloves, who got to make just one more film – before minting it by scripting the Harry Potter series.  GL

97.  Un Chant d'Amour (1950)

Director:   Jean Genet

Cast:   Java, André Reybaz, Lucien Sénémaud

Jean Genet had already been discharged from the French Foreign Legion for indecency, bummed around Europe as a thief and rent-boy, and forged a strong literary reputation before he made this silent, clandestinely-shot 26-minute short in 1950. It’s a potent combination of the raw and the poetic, as male prisoners writhe under the lustful eye of a peeping guard, dreaming of encounters metaphorical and corporeal.

Its explicit gaze is still pretty eye-popping by conventional standards, and in 1966 a California court banned Un Chant d’Amour , pronouncing it ‘cheap pornography calculated to promote homosexuality, perversion and morbid sex practices’. Needless to say, it became an underground sensation (though nowadays it’s on Youtube), and a touchstone for future film-makers including Kenneth Anger, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes.   TJ

98.  Atlantics (2019)

Director: Mati Diop

Cast: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré

An almost indefinable collision of romance, ghost story and social realism, Mati Diop’s Senegal-set film is unlike anything you’ve seen before and yet is still utterly relatable – after all, the feeling of being haunted by a lost love is something we can all understand. Here it’s Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), a determined young woman stuck in a loveless engagement, who follows her heart to some weird and wonderful places. It’s a journey worth going on. AS

99.  Buffalo '66 (1998)

Director:   Vincent Gallo

Cast:   Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci

Nothing about Gallo's winningly strange debut feature approaches romance in a fashion most viewers are likely to recognise, or even desire. Stockholm Syndrome is a tricky concept at the best of times, and when the captor is Billy, a maladjusted, abusive ex-con played by Gallo, it's fair to say our perceptions of love's limits and limitations are being tested.

Yet as Layla, the zoned-out tap dancer Billy kidnaps so she can pose as his wife at his ghastly parents' house, gawkily luminous Ricci somehow persuades us that there's something to be saved in this lonely wastrel – though probably not in their bizarre relationship. It's a love we can believe, even if we can't quite believe   in   it.   GL

100.  Out of Sight (1998)

Director:   Steven Soderbergh

Cast:   George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez

Playing out from the warmth of Miami to the tundra chill of Detroit, Steven Soderbergh’s breezy crime caper slowly reveals itself as a sparkling love story disguised as a crime caper. Instead of Bogart and Bacall or Hepburn and Tracy, it’s George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez conjuring up a lab’s worth of on-screen chemistry – and taking one of the steamiest fantasy baths in cinema along the way – as a bank robber and FBI agent who fall in love at great risk to her career and his freedom. You hope, pray, that somehow they’ll both get away with their clandestine affair without it robbing this perfect movie of its storytelling nouse. And thanks to the perfect ending, they do. PDS

101.  A Star is Born (2018)

Director: Bradley Cooper

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga

Did the world really need another remake of A Star is Born ? Bradley Cooper seemed to think so, and we’re glad he did. This reimagining centres around Ally (played expertly by Lady Gaga in her leading-lady debut), a wannabe singer whose career takes off thanks to the help of weathered-rockstar-turned-lover Jackson Maine (Cooper). It’s a film that gives an insight into the intense relationships that can form between creatives, exploring how loving and volatile they can be, and it handles themes of addiction, mental health and jealousy with a soft and tender hand. It’s the film’s first third, however, that really gives it that romantic punch as Jackson and Ally, following a serendipitous meeting at a cabaret bar, spend the night together sharing stories from their lives. It’s a throwback love-at-first-sight moment lifted right from the Hollywood of yesteryear. AS

The 50 best romcoms of all time

From Nora Ephron classics to Richard Curtis movies there's something here for everyone. 

The 100 best comedy movies: the funniest films of all time

All romanced out? Try a comedy. 

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35 Best Romantic Movies Streaming [December 2023]

We love romance movies so much that we're willing to run through the rain just for the chance to make a heartfelt confession of our feelings. After all, it's easier than writing a love song to perform on acoustic guitar. And do you know how hard it is these days to convince airport security to let you through just so you can declare your love to someone right before they get on a plane? We'll take the rain, thanks. So imagine us suitably drenched in the best, most satisfyingly cliché fashion as we admit that we love all this stuff. Our favorite romance movies range from silly high-concept farces to bittersweet weepies and include everything in between. Best of all, we have several decades' worth of charmers to draw on, giving us a selection of romance films that spans both the classics and the movies that are expanding the genre in new directions.

Updated on December 4, 2023 : Some romances are married to their streaming services, but others just flirt with them occasionally. We'll keep track of which is which and update this list every month to make sure it always reflects the best love stories streaming right now.

10 Things I Hate About You - Disney+, Prime Video

Shakespeare comes to high school with "10 Things I Hate About You," a sweet-tart updating of "The Taming of the Shrew." Bad boy Patrick agrees to romance the acerbic, independent Kat so that her overprotective father will let her younger sister, Bianca, date the doe-eyed Cameron ... or the far less sincere Joey. While Patrick first takes Kat out just for the money, the two social outsiders soon start developing a real connection, but can it outlast the revelation about the dating scheme? This is one of the top teen romances, especially thanks to its unbeatable cast.

• Starring: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger , Joseph Gordon-Levitt
• Director: Gil Junger
• Year:  1999
• Runtime:  97 minutes
• Rating:  PG-13
• Rotten Tomatoes Score:  70%

Always Be My Maybe - Netflix

The quirky, warm, and wildly funny "Always Be My Maybe" is a romance that doubles as a slow-burn coming-of-age story. Marcus and Sasha are inseparable as kids, and it's easy to see how perfectly they complement each other — but when their friendship escalates to sex and romance, it does so at the worst possible time. They don't reconnect again until they're adults, when Sasha is a high-powered chef and Marcus is an amiable slacker musician. She needs help reclaiming her sense of home, he needs help taking risks, and they both need each other. The movie's laid-back charm is enhanced by a hilarious meta performance from Keanu Reeves.

• Starring: Ali Wong, Randall Park, Keanu Reeves
• Director: Nahnatchka Khan
• Runtime: 102 minutes
• Rating: PG-13
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 89%

Beauty and the Beast – Criterion Channel, Max

You may think you know the story of Beauty and the Beast by heart, but there's no version quite as magical as Jean Cocteau's, one of the most visually stunning films ever made. After a mysterious Beast captures Belle's father, the kind-hearted peasant girl volunteers to take his place and live in the Beast's enchanted castle. In her otherworldly new home, full of magic mirrors and living statues, Belle falls in love with the noble-hearted Beast — but intruders from the outside world threaten to destroy their paradise. Gloriously shot in black and white, "Beauty and the Beast" is the definitive live-action adaptation of this tale as old as time.

• Starring: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély
• Director: Jean Cocteau
• Running Time: 93 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95%

The Big Sick - Prime Video

Severe, unexpected illness comes as both a tragedy and a strange blessing in the funny, bittersweet, and emotionally complex film "The Big Sick." Stand-up comedian Kumail quickly hits it off with Emily. When it's just the two of them, they click on every level ... but Kumail can't see a future where his traditionalist parents will be happy with their relationship. Their breakup leaves them both raw, and before they can really grapple with their feelings, Emily gets horribly sick and has to be put into a medically induced coma. Kumail winds up at her bedside after all, striking up an unexpected bond with her anxious parents.

• Starring:   Kumail Nanjiani , Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter
• Director: Michael Showalter
• Runtime: 120 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 98%

Bound - Paramount+, Pluto TV

Directed by the groundbreaking Lilly and Lana Wachowski, "Bound" puts a sapphic spin on the neo-noir thriller. Leather-clad ex-con Corky falls under the spell of the sweet-voiced Violet after she's hired to refurbish the apartment next door. But if the new lovers want to ride off into the sunset, they will have to dispose of Violet's money-laundering boyfriend, Caesar. Erotic and electrifying, "Bound" sets pulses racing with its stylish direction and the compelling romance at its criminal heart.

• Starring: Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano
• Directors: Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
• Runtime: 108 minutes

Brief Encounter - Criterion, Freevee, Max

"Brief Encounter" is one of the all-time best bittersweet romantic dramas. This intimate, well-characterized piece shows what happens when two people who might be made for each other — Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey — find each other too late. Their chance meeting at a train station turns into an easy, intimate friendship that soon starts shading into romance; it would be a wonderful start to a new life together if they both weren't already married to other people. In the 1940s, that was a hard obstacle to overcome, especially with children involved. They can't bring themselves to end good, solid marriages of grounded love and contentment for the sake of this passion, and that makes their fleeting connection all the more moving.

• Starring: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway
• Director: David Lean
• Runtime:  87 minutes
• Rating:  NR
• Rotten Tomatoes Score:  91%

Breakfast at Tiffany's - Paramount+

"Breakfast at Tiffany's" tells the immortal story of Holly Golightly, a New York City socialite with a chic Givenchy wardrobe, an orange cat named "Cat," and an effervescent smile that hides a lonely heart. When struggling writer Paul Varjak moves into her apartment building, he's immediately smitten with the flighty Miss Golightly, but her desire to marry for money puts a barrier between them. Featuring an iconic opening scene in which little-black-dress-clad Holly eats a pastry in front of the Tiffany & Co. window and an Academy Award-winning score by Henry Mancini, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is the crown jewel in Audrey Hepburn's sparkling career.

• Starring:  Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal
• Director: Blake Edwards
• Runtime: 114 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

Casablanca - Max

It's 1941, World War II is in full swing, and the weary and cynical Rick Blaine is determined to stay out of it. He's had his fill of heroism and politics, and now he just wants to keep his head down and run his club. Casablanca, however, is a major hub for a dangerous mix of Nazis, collaborators, and desperate refugees and fugitives ... and one of the people passing through is Ilsa, Rick's long-lost love. She isn't there to reconnect; she just needs his help getting her husband, a noble leader in the Resistance, to safety. "Casablanca" is an iconic romance that examines a case where doing the right thing may mean breaking your own heart.

• Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid
• Director: Michael Curtiz
• Year:  1942
• Runtime:  102 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 99%

Clueless - Paramount+, Pluto TV

One of the most beloved teen movies of the 1990s, "Clueless" gives Jane Austen's classic novel "Emma" a modern makeover. Bubbly Beverly Hills teen Cher Horowitz catches the matchmaking bug, pairing up her teachers and trying to find a boyfriend for Tai, the shy new girl at school. But when it comes to Cher's own love life — and her feelings for her ex-step brother Josh — Cher is totally clueless. Endlessly quotable ("As if!") and featuring star-making turns from Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, and the ageless Paul Rudd, "Clueless" is a classic.

• Starring: Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd , Brittany Murphy
• Director: Amy Heckerling
• Year : 1995
• Rating : PG-13
• Running Time: 97 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 81%

Desert Hearts - Criterion, Max

Lives are on hold in the funny, passionate, and insightful "Desert Hearts." Vivian needs a six-week stay in Reno if she wants to get her divorce, and that means hanging around a ranch that serves as a kind of waiting room for women going through the same thing. There she meets Cay, a vibrant young woman who makes her attraction to Vivian very clear. Vivian's never been with a woman before, and while she's drawn to Cay, she's unsure if she wants to commit to her ... especially when it means accepting that her life won't be exactly conventional for 1959.

• Starring:  Helen Shaver, Patricia Charbonneau, Audra Lindley
• Director:  Donna Deitch
• Runtime: 96 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 90%

The Half of It - Netflix

"The Half of It" features a tender and unusual love triangle that riffs on "Cyrano de Bergerac." Jock Paul is sweet and earnest, but he doesn't have a way with words, and his intellectual horizons are narrow. He knows it, so when he wants to woo the popular Astrid (who's already dating someone else), he hires geeky Ellie Chu to write his texts and love letters. Astrid starts falling for Ellie's words, Ellie starts falling for Astrid, and Paul increasingly finds himself falling for Ellie. Their youth and small town upbringing makes all this even more difficult, but it plays out with delicacy and realism.

• Starring:  Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, Alexxis Lemire
• Director:  Alice Wu
• Runtime: 104 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Happiest Season - Hulu

The holidays are a lonely time for Abby. When her girlfriend, Harper, impulsively invites her to come home with her for Christmas, Abby eagerly accepts, thinking this should be the perfect chance to propose. But Harper is still in the closet with her family, so Abby is forced back in alongside of her, with the two of them pretending to just be roommates. The strain of lying — all while Abby wonders if Harper will choose to trade their happiness for her parents' approval — takes a serious toll on their relationship. "Happiest Season" infuses holiday romance tropes with a lot of raw emotion, and its performances are alternately warm, funny, and heartbreaking.

• Starring:   Kristen Stewart , Mackenzie Davis, Alison Brie
• Director:  Clea DuVall
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 82%

In the Mood for Love - Criterion, Max

The gorgeously shot "In the Mood for Love" is suffused with a poignant sense of romantic longing. Su Li-shen and Chow Mo-wan live next door to each other. Both of them are quietly lonely in their marriages, a feeling that only deepens when they find out her husband is having an affair with his wife. The two of them are drawn to each other, and their combination of emotional intimacy and physical restraint has a palpable charge. The film is melancholy but beautiful, with an exquisite sense for the small moments of closeness and yearning between its characters.

• Starring:  Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung , Siu Ping Lam
• Director:  Wong Kar-wai
• Runtime: 98 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Juliet, Naked - Prime Video

Annie Platt has had it up to here with her boyfriend's adoration of reclusive musician Tucker Crowe. She knows writing a takedown of one of Crowe's albums will upset him, but she can't resist. The last thing she expects is for the bad review to wind up introducing her to Tucker himself, who's grown sick of admirers and wants something honest and real. Annie and Tucker have an earthy, slightly world-weary chemistry that offers them both escape and stability. Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, and Chris O'Dowd all shine in this nuanced romantic comedy.

• Starring:  Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke , Chris O'Dowd
• Director: Jesse Peretz
• Runtime: 105 minutes

The Lady Eve - The Criterion Channel

"I need him," says Jean Harrington, a fortune-hunting con artist, about the rich man she has unwittingly fallen in love with, "Like the axe needs the turkey." While helping her card shark father swindle wealthy passengers on an ocean liner, Jean plans to seduce hapless ale fortune heir Charles Pike. When her ruse is discovered, Jean concocts a second identity as "The Lady Eve" to fleece Charles yet again. But he couldn't possibly fall for the "same dame" twice, could he? An unlikely love story between an axe and a turkey, "The Lady Eve" is an irrepressible, unforgettable screwball comedy that sparkles with wit and sensuality.

• Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn
• Director: Preston Sturges
• Runtime: 97 minutes
• Rating: Not Rated

Making Mr. Right - Pluto TV, Tubi

They say a good man is hard to find — so why not try dating a robot? Sparks fly when Frankie Stone meets Ulysses, a handsome blonde android made in the exact image of his creator, Dr. Jeff Peters (John Malkovich in a delightful dual role). Frankie is hired to promote Ulysses' upcoming space mission, but to her surprise, the robot proves to be much more human than the scientist who made him. "Making Mr. Right" puts a whimsical sci-fi spin on the romantic comedy by asking two key questions: Can true love blossom between man and machine? Or will poor Ulysses fall to pieces?

• Starring: John Malkovich, Ann Magnuson, Glenne Headly
• Director: Susan Seidelman
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 56%

Maurice – Kanopy, Tubi

Based on the classic novel by E.M. Forster, "Maurice" is an achingly beautiful depiction of a forbidden love triangle. While studying at Cambridge, young Maurice Hall falls in love with his classmate, Clive — but in Edwardian England, being gay risks social ostracization and even imprisonment. Clive marries a woman for respectability's sake, breaking Maurice's heart. As Maurice struggles with his identity in a world that seemingly has no place for him, Alec — Clive's rough-and-tumble gamekeeper — suddenly appears to offer him salvation. Carefully observed and splendidly acted, deep passions simmer under the film's elegant surface, and in Maurice himself.

• Starring: James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves
• Director: James Ivory
• Running Time: 140 minutes

Much Ado About Nothing - Pluto TV, Prime Video, Tubi

A matchmaking prince sets a wave of comedy, drama, and — of course — romance into motion in this delightfully witty Shakespearean adaptation. After Don Pedro successfully arranges a match between his friend Claudio and the sweet Hero, he turns his attention to the constantly bickering Beatrice and Benedick. What if each of them could be convinced that the other was secretly in love with them? Would that be enough to overcome their prickly animosity? Of course it is, and the two immediately begin to fall in love. Unfortunately, Don Pedro's scheming half-brother is all set to make trouble that could ruin everything ....

• Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington
• Director: Kenneth Branagh
• Runtime: 110 minutes

My Big Fat Greek Wedding - Max

Toula Portokalos has always felt awkwardly caught between her traditional and boisterous Greek family and generic American culture. As she becomes more independent and comfortable in her own skin, she dares to pursue a relationship with charming, easygoing Ian, even though she knows her family would hate the fact that he's not Greek. Secrets don't stay buried for long, however ... especially after Ian proposes. Toula and Ian's sweet, low-key love story supports this big-hearted family comedy about acceptance, affection, and the surprising healing properties of Windex.

• Starring:  Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Lainie Kazan
• Director: Joel Zwick
• Runtime: 94 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 76%

Phantom Thread - Netflix

In "Phantom Thread," Daniel Day-Lewis gives his final onscreen performance as Reynolds Woodcock, a brilliant but aloof fashion designer in 1950s London. Reynolds meets a charming waitress, Alma, who becomes his muse and lover after a whirlwind courtship. When Reynolds' controlling personality threatens their happiness, Alma concocts an unusual plan to restore the balance of power in their relationship. The rough outline of "Phantom Thread" may seem like a familiar take on the Pygmalion myth, but this darkly funny, sumptuously shot film reveals startling depths. Ultimately, it's a love story between two passionate, iron-willed people who have finally met their match in each other.

• Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville
• Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
• Running Time: 130 minutes

The Photograph - Peacock

The death of famous photographer Christina Eames inspires her daughter Mae to uncover the secrets of her past and the love her mother left behind. Unbeknownst to her, a handsome and charming journalist named Michael is on the same quest. "The Photograph" spans decades, chronicling Christina's doomed relationship with Mae's father as well as Mae's burgeoning romance with Michael. But the past is in danger of repeating itself, unless Mae can break the cycle and follow her heart. Electric performances from lead actors Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield elevate an already moving love story into a must-watch for romance fans.

• Starring: Issa Rae, LaKeith Stanfield, Chanté Adams
• Director: Stella Meghie
• Running Time: 106 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 75%

Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Hulu

This bittersweet historical romance tells the story of a portrait — which is also the hidden love story of artist Marianne and her subject, the upper-class Héloïse. Héloïse's mother plans to send her daughter's portrait to an Italian nobleman who may propose, but Héloïse's lack of interest in marriage means Marianne is supposed to do her work in secret. She finds herself transfixed by Héloïse, however, and the painting process becomes both open and romantically and erotically charged. The two fall in love, but they're all too aware that it would be almost impossible for them to build a future together. "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" is a wistfully and sometimes agonizingly beautiful look at the lifelong importance of even cruelly short-lived romances.

• Starring:  Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami
• Director:  Céline Sciamma

Set It Up - Netflix

Harper and Charlie are high-powered executive assistants at the ends of their ropes. Their demanding, hyper-critical bosses are workaholics in a perpetually bad mood, so Harper hits on a zany plan: Make the two of them fall in love. While she and Charlie are rigging schedules and providing romantic lines to puppeteer the intense Kirsten and the volatile Rick into falling for each other, they can't help getting closer. Their mutual snark and genuine affection for each other quickly starts spelling romance. Unfortunately, their plan's success might come with its own devastating failures. The office setting and "Parent Trap"-style shenanigans are both fun, but the characters (including the ensemble) are what really make "Set It Up" shine.

• Starring:  Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell, Lucy Liu
• Director:  Claire Scanlon
• Rating: TV-14
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

Shotgun Wedding - Prime Video

Action and comedy collide in the charming "Shotgun Wedding." Darcy and Tom's dream destination wedding in the Philippines is off to a rocky start — and that's before a team of armed pirates storm the island and take the guests hostage. Darcy, still decked out in her wedding dress, narrowly manages to escape with her fiancé, and it's up to her and Tom to save their families and their troubled relationship. This dizzy, delightful romantic adventure film is destined to become a date night favorite.

• Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge
• Director: Jason Moore
• Running Time: 101 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 44%

Some Like It Hot - Max

The inspiration for the 2020 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, "Some Like It Hot" has been ranked as one of the greatest films ever made. After witnessing a mob massacre, 1920s jazz musicians Joe and Jerry flee the scene and join a band headed to Miami. The catch? The band is for female musicians, causing Joe and Jerry to don the drag disguises of "Josephine" and "Daphne." Joe takes a second disguise to woo his bandmate, the sweetly cynical Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe in one of her most famous roles), while an eccentric millionaire courts "Daphne." From the opening credits to its iconic final scene, "Some Like It Hot" is a witty, boundary-breaking romantic farce.

• Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
• Director: Billy Wilder
• Runtime: 121 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes: 94%

Sylvie's Love - Freevee, Prime Video

A chance encounter in 1962 New York City reignites an old flame in magnetic melodrama "Sylvie's Love." When Sylvie and Robert first meet in her father's record shop in 1957, their spark is undeniable. Fate pulls them apart — Sylvie is engaged to another man, and Robert's jazz quartet has a job in Paris — but soon they meet again, and know they love only each other. Can they make peace with the past without sacrificing their dreams for the future? Featuring sumptuous costumes and an unforgettable soundtrack, "Sylvie's Love" is a glittering gem of a film.

• Starring: Tessa Thompson, Nnamdi Asomugha, Eva Longoria
• Director: Eugene Ashe
• Running Time: 114 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Titanic - Paramount+, Pluto TV

"Titanic" likely needs no introduction, given its legendary reputation for breaking hearts and box office records. Nominated for 14 Academy Awards and one of the highest-grossing films of all time, "Titanic" is a sprawling and sparkling epic about the 1912 sinking of the titular passenger liner. Wealthy heiress Rose meets and falls in love with Jack, a poor artist traveling in steerage. The ship strikes an iceberg, interrupting Rose and Jack's whirlwind romance and threatening the lives of everyone onboard. An unforgettable cinematic experience, "Titanic" is one of best romance films of the 20th century.

• Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane
• Director: James Cameron
• Running Time: 194 minutes

To All the Boys I've Loved Before - Netflix

Like many teenagers, Lara Jean has had her fair share of crushes. Since she knows she'll never work up the courage to tell any of them how she feels, she pours out all her feelings into letters they're never actually meant to read. It's just a way to grapple with all the ups and downs of unrequited love — until the letters get mailed. Oops. In a twist, this leads to her pretending to date one of the boys, Peter, so she can help him make his ex-girlfriend jealous. It works, but Lara Jean and Peter's fake closeness is rapidly turning real. "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" is cute, funny, and touching, and its heroine is a particular delight.

• Starring:  Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Janel Parrish
• Director:  Susan Johnson
• Runtime: 99 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - The Criterion Channel, Max

"The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is a beautifully crafted romantic musical that looks at both the heightened romance of a first love and the kind of later, slower love that nonetheless endures. Geneviève and Guy adore each other, but when Guy is drafted, they have to part — and the long, difficult separation gets even harder when Geneviève realizes she's pregnant. If her love story with Guy hadn't been interrupted, they could have easily had a happy ending with each other — but under the circumstances, they both move on to new lovers who truly care for them, and they start building separate, contented lives. The film couples its heady romance with sensitivity and emotional maturity.

• Starring:  Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon
• Director:  Jacques Demy
• Year: 1964 
• Runtime: 91 minutes

Valley Girl - Pluto TV, Tubi

"Romeo and Juliet" as reimagined for the MTV Generation, the '80s teen classic "Valley Girl" is a pure bubblegum delight. Mall-hopping Valley Girl Julie is pretty and popular, but she has doubts about her boyfriend, wannabe prom king Tommy. Julie's true love is the handsome Hollywood punk Randy (Nicolas Cage, in his first starring role), but will pressure from her disapproving friends drive them apart? This star-crossed romance features a dizzying New Wave soundtrack and inspired a 2020 remake.

• Starring: Nicolas Cage , Deborah Foreman, Frederic Forest
• Director: Martha Coolidge
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 83%

The Wedding Singer - Hulu

Adam Sandler plays Robbie Hart, one of his most memorable and endearing characters, in the totally tubular romantic comedy "The Wedding Singer." It's New Jersey in the 1980s, and mullet-haired musician Robbie loves his job as a wedding singer — until his fiancée dumps him at the altar. His new friendship with Julia, a sweet-natured waitress at his reception hall, develops into something more, but Robbie must sing his way into her heart before she marries the wrong man. Bursting at the spandex seams with humor and heart (and nonstop '80s jokes), "The Wedding Singer" proves that stars Sandler and Drew Barrymore are a match made in movie heaven.

• Starring: Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Christine Taylor
• Director: Frank Coraci
• Runtime: 100 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 72%

West Side Story - Disney+

Steven Spielberg revisits the classic musical "West Side Story" in a heartfelt, impassioned, and colorful way. This story of 1950s star-crossed love shows the "Romeo and Juliet"-inspired tragedy of the sweet but doomed romance between a white member of a scrappy street gang and a young Puerto Rican department store cleaner whose brother heads up a rival gang. Tony and Maria fall in love at first sight, but they live in different — and constantly clashing — worlds. With a big intergang rumble on the horizon, the two of them do their best to craft the kind of peace that might allow them to be happy.

• Starring:  Rachel Zegler, Ansel Elgort, Ariana DeBose
• Director:  Steven Spielberg
• Runtime: 156 minutes

What's Up, Doc? - Max

Paying homage to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s, "What's Up, Doc?" is a fizzy, freewheeling romantic farce. Straitlaced musicologist Howard Bannister travels to San Francisco on business, only for his life to be thrown into chaos when the hotel mixes up his luggage with identical bags containing top-secret government documents and priceless jewels. Also staying at the hotel? Judy Maxwell, a free spirit whose irrepressible charm could save Howard — if she doesn't drive him absolutely bonkers first. Sparkling and witty, "What's Up, Doc?" culminates with Howard and Judy caught in a madcap chase through San Francisco that must be seen to be believed.

• Starring: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Madeline Kahn
• Director: Peter Bogdanovich

While You Were Sleeping - Disney+

Lucy works at a Chicago train station and fills some of the dull hours by daydreaming about regular fare Peter Callaghan, the crush she's never even truly met. Her dreams get mistaken for reality when a severe injury leaves Peter in a coma, and a nurse mistakes Lucy's romantic wistfulness for a full-on relationship. Suddenly, Peter's delightful, welcoming family are all convinced that Lucy and Peter are engaged, and Lucy doesn't have the heart to tell them otherwise. As an added complication, she starts to realize that the Callaghan man for her may actually be Peter's brother, Jack. The emotions and warmth of "While You Were Sleeping" have helped make it a Christmas romantic comedy classic.

• Starring:  Sandra Bullock, Bill Pullman, Peter Gallagher
• Director:  Jon Turteltaub
• Runtime: 103 minutes

Written on the Wind - The Criterion Channel

Director Douglas Sirk was the master of the opulent 1950s melodrama, and there is perhaps no better example than the deliciously decadent "Written on the Wind." Geologist Mitch Wayne has long lived in the shadow of the affluent Hadley Oil family, particularly spoiled siblings Kyle and Marylee. When Mitch falls for the beautiful Lucy Moore, Kyle sweeps her off her feet and marries her, leaving Wayne in Marylee's clutches. The love polygon may be as toxic as an oil spill, but "Written on the Wind" is a sumptuous, subversive, and surprisingly soulful romance anchored by powerful performances from Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall.

• Starring: Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack
• Director: Douglas Sirk
• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87%

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Best Romance Movies You Can Watch for Free on YouTube

Love is for all platforms. Here are the best romance movies you can watch for free on YouTube.

• Free romance movies on YouTube offer classic screwball plots and feel-good rom-coms for cozy nights in.
• From The Accidental Husband to Ball of Fire, there's a range of romances available with a simple click on YouTube.
• Keep up with YouTube's latest free offerings for rom-com fans like What Women Want and The Back-Up Plan for a heartfelt movie night.

Nothing screams a cozy night in quite like a good Romance movie. With so many streaming platforms at our disposal, each with their own select user fee, it's hard not to spend an arm and a leg to tame that love story fix. Viewers who know where to look, however, can find some of their favorites go tos free of charge if they know where to look. Fortunately, the number of no-charge streaming options has soared in recent years. Those willing to sit through an ad or five will find their options ripe for watching.

Oldie but goodie YouTube just so happens to be one of these options.YouTube has a plethora of movies to choose from that are free (with ads). While obvious favorites like The Twilight Saga and forgotten cult classics like Cry, Baby abound, there are far more options for those looking for a classic screwball or drama. From Ball of Fire to A Walk to Remember , to What Women Want , here are some of the best romance movies you can watch for free on YouTube.

Updated March 9th, 2024 by Amanda Minchin : Rom-com fanatics and the like will be glad to know this article was just updated to include YouTube's most up-to-date listings!

10 The Accidental Husband (2008)

The accidental husband.

The Accidental Husband is a romantic comedy from 2008 that starred Uma Turman as Emma and The Walking Dead 's own Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Patrick. In this film, radio host and relationship advice guru Emma's world is turned upside down when her upcoming marriage to Richard (Colin Firth) is delayed because she is still technically married to a man named Patrick. Patrick is a firefighter and the cunning mastermind behind Emma's troubles. He fabricates an elaborate plan for revenge that eventually leads to an unintentional and unexpected love story.

A Classic 2000s Delight

The title alone practically guarantees a formulaic, feel-good time. Uma Thurman provides a knock-out performance worthy of screwball originals, and her co-stars aren't too shabby either. Colin Firth is notorious for his leading male roles in romcoms like Bridget Jones' Diary , so his casting is perfect. Jeffrey Dean Morgan shows a familiarly scheming, but far more wholesome side to his acting repertoire. The film is chock-full of the typical screwball plot devices, from overly complicated problem-solving to impractically dramatic stakes, and has all the makings of a comfortable rom-com binge.

Stream on YouTube

9 The Back-Up Plan (2010)

The back-up plan.

Continuing on the romantic comedy train, 2010's The Back-Up Plan , starring Jennifer Lopez and Alex O'Loughlin, is a solid choice for a free movie on YouTube. This rollercoaster of a plot starts with a desperate Zoe (Lopez), whose internal clock is ticking into overtime. Tired of waiting for the perfect relationship, she decides to get artificially inseminated in order to start a family. She then meets Stan (O'Loughlin) and the two completely hit it off. Zoe might have found her one and only, but is that one and only ready for fatherhood?

A Surprisingly Poignant Rom-Com

Kudos are in order for an early 2010s film about artificial insemination and its surrounding cultural questions. Jennifer Lopez is an icon in more ways than one, including her romcom lead prowess . While Alex O'Loughlin may perhaps be better known for his stint as Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett on Hawaii Five-0 , he manages to bring his comedic genre-mashing chops to the role. While the premise is fresh, the momentum of this film can be a bit still at times, its ending is far worth the wait.

8 What Women Want (2000)

What Women Want is a classic pairing of rivals to relations. In it, Mel Gibson plays chauvinist advertising exec Nick Marshall who, after a freak accident with a blow dryer, is suddenly able to eavesdrop on women's thoughts. Having recently lost a promotion and with his company looking to conquer the more feminine market, he uses this newfound skill to his advantage to listen in on his new boss, Darcy Maguire (Helen Hunt). Of course, this causes him to fall hard for her in the process. Between repairing his relationships with his female co-workers (and his young daughter) and coming up with the perfect ad campaign to impress his bosses, he takes full advantage of this newfound gift for as long as it lasts.

A Formula that Works

Acclaimed filmmaker Nancy Meyers is at her best in this film, as are Hunt and Gibson. Both actors were at the top of their game at the time, and their onscreen chemistry is absolutely electric. The message of empathy for one's fellow man (or woman, in this case), is hard to deny. Marshall's behavior is shown to stem from his upbringing in a casino, an insight that might otherwise have been lost in less adept hands. There's a formulaic nature to this film, yes, but it only serves to punctuate the story and its message all the more.

The 10 Most Underrated Performances In Romance Movies Of All Time

7 penelope (2006).

*Availability in US

Not available

Penelope tells the story of a family cursed by the decisions of their ancestors to not accept a pair of young lovers. In the present day, Penelope (Christina Ricci), an aristocratic heiress, is born with a pig snout as a result. The only way to break the curse is to find her true love, someone who will wholeheartedly accept her, snout and all. Her well-meaning, but utterly misguided parents hide her from the world for years... that is until, sometime after her 18th birthday, when they decide to take her love life into their own hands. Their attempts to set her up with a fellow blueblood, however, go horribly awry, leading Penelope to strike off on her own in search of acceptance.

Elevated by a Brilliant Ensemble Cast

Released during the height of fable fantasy fervor, this modern take on classic fairy tale tropes is nothing short of delightful. There is a message of acceptance hidden deep beneath the overtures of classism. Plus, this cast reads like an understated who's who, from Catherine O'Hara as Penelope's mother, to James McAvoy as a kind, but subterfuging suitor, to Peter Dinklage and Reese Witherspoon as newfound friends Penelope finds along the way. And, with a PG rating, the film is wholesome enough to binge with some younger loved ones in tow.

6 Ball of Fire (1941)

Ball of Fire is a classic screwball comedy featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. The story centers around a group of bachelors (and one widower) who live and work together in a prim and proper pad. Desperate to understand and learn some more modern colloquialisms to add to the work, the youngest of them, Professor Potts, a grammarian in American slang, turns to Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea for advice. A nightclub performer by trade, she only agrees to stay after finding herself on the run from police as a result of her mob boyfriend's shenanigans. The pair, of course, take a liking to each other, but are forced to put their feelings aside momentarily for the sake of the book and their lives after Sugarpuss' angry boyfriend comes a'calling.

A Screwball Comedy that Stands the Test of Time

This title perfectly encapsulates Stanwyck's character, a firecracker with a silver tongue for 'modern' American colloquialisms. Obvious references to the fable of Snow White aside, this juxtaposition of stuffiness and flamboyance makes for some incredible screwball shenanigans. The chemistry between the two leads is rife, though they are at times outmatched by those of their academic companions. A common matter in romantic comedies, the couple's attempts to save each other are of course what ultimately keep them apart for so long. Viewers will have to refrain from yelling at the screen for some more open and honest communication, which really would have solved just about all the woes of these two lovebirds to begin with.

Best Classic Screwball Comedies, Ranked

5 the wedding singer (1988), the wedding singer.

The Wedding Singer features Adam Sandler as Robbie and Drew Barrymore as Julia, two features of the wedding circuit who are just perfect for each other. The only problem? Both of them are already engaged... to other people. That is until Robbie is dumped at the altar by his fiancé, who fell in love with his rock star persona and just can't stomach his new career as a wedding singer. This puts an obvious damper on both his personal and professional life as his gigs turn more and more sour. What follows is the ultimate will-they-won't-they as the newfound work pair finds their feelings for each other growing in spite of or because of their current and ex-spouses to be.

Irresistible Chemistry Between Sandler and Barrymore

This one is a classic on must-watch weekend re-runs for a reason. An early pairing between Sandler and Barrymore, it's no wonder after watching this film why they would go on to star alongside each other in so many more films. This film is easily one of Sandler's all-time best comedies, with just the right mix of oddball to offset the otherwise romantic tropes. Set in the '80s with the costumes and soundtrack to match, this film has an understated realness of work relationships amid the ridiculousness of wedding day jams. Plus, it's a chance to check out the comedic stylings of the always hilarious Ellen Albertini Dow as Rosie.

4 Every Day (2018)

Based on the novel by David Levithan, Every Day follows the love story between 16-year-old Rhiannon (Angourie Rice), who falls in love with the mysterious 'A' (who is played by far too many actors to list here). 'A', you see, is a traveling spirit, an entity that wakes up in a different living teenage body, regardless of gender, every day. Rhiannon first meets 'A' when they wake up in the body of Justin, her otherwise neglectful boyfriend. A day spent alongside her, of course, causes 'A' to fall madly in love with her, which leads them to seek her out long after he leaves her boyfriend behind. Upon learning his secret, Rhiannon is challenged to fall and stay in love with someone whose gender-fluid, outward-facing form is forever in flux.

A Romance with Philosophical Undertones

This film does a stellar job of creating purpose for the characters in a cohesive narrative, it also manages to sneak in a handful of ethical conundrums, mostly centering around the agency of 'A' as they take over the lives of others. The bodies 'A' possess do not usually remember their previous day(s) spent taken over by 'A'. This begs the question of whether it is fair for 'A' to exist in others, especially when they take over bodies for an extended period of time, living their lives for them. The answer is, in a word no, a sad fact that both Rhiannon and 'A' both come to accept after time. Thankfully, 'A' manages to use their powers for good, for the most part, and still manages to leave an indelible impact on the lives they briefly possess.

3 The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

The time traveler's wife.

There's nothing like a bit of time travel to up the stakes for romance. The Time Traveler's Wife stars Eric Bana as the traveler in question, Henry DeTamble, and Rachel McAdams as Clare Abshire, his wife. Based on Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 novel, the film follows DeTamble's entrances and exits into Clare's life, which is the result of an uncontrollable para-genetic disorder. As a result, he travels back and forth between different important moments of his life without notice. Unable to change much about them, he struggles to develop a relationship with the love of his life, for whom his sudden appearances and reappearances throughout the course of her life eventually take their toll.

Another Sci-Fi-Tinged Romance

There is a graceful fluidity to this romance in what might otherwise have been marred with overwrought science-fiction explanations. While it is at first unsettling to watch DeTamble meet up with his wife in her pre-pubescent years and beyond, their involvement over time serves to both bond them together and tear them apart. There is an uneasy feeling of knowing what will pass, reliving old memories in real-time, and not being able to spend moments in said real-time with the ones you love. The mystery of not knowing when and where the main character will appear and reappear makes for some brilliant dramatic moments, which are only punctuated further by the unknown of just when they might happen.

20 Timeless Romance Movies That Never Get Old

2 overboard (1987).

Overboard is an '80s comedy classic. Starring real-life partners Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, this film follows a bratty socialite (Hawn) who loses her memory after falling overboard her yacht. The repair person she recently fired, Russell, comes to her aid but decides to use her loss to his advantage. Claiming to be her husband, he brings her home from the hospital to take care of his brood of rambunctious boys in their stuffed to the seams house. What will happen when she falls wise to his ploy? Will she stay 'married' and give up her former lifestyle? Or abandon this strange man and his family altogether. This film, which was remade in 2018 , is available on YouTube alongside the remake.

A Strange Premise that Has Aged Surprisingly Well

While the concept in this film is undoubtedly alarming, there is a deftness to the handling of this gaslighting plot. This is due, in part, to the skill of screenwriter Leslie Dixon, who would go on to create even more cult favorites like Mrs. Doubtfire just a few years later. The chemistry between Russell and Hawn, as well as their ability to play so well off of each other comedically, is why this film stands out as so crazily re-watchable years later, Stockholm syndrome and all. By some magic of filmmaking, both Russell's character and that of his rambunctious brood, seem to somehow, inexplicably, grow on the viewer with each watch.

1 A Walk to Remember (2002)

The iconic teen drama A Walk to Remember is based on an early Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name. The film stars Shane West as Landon and Mandy Moore as Jamie. What starts out as a classic '50s Romeo and Juliet story meets 10 Things I Hate About You takes a hard turn into reality as forces beyond their control serve to push them apart. Will Jamie's illness push them apart? Love, understanding, and passion are constants as they navigate their youth with what time they have left.

A Timeless Tearjerker

There's nothing like young love and a coming-of-age romance, particularly when that film is as highly rewatchable as this one is. Melodramatic to its core, A Walk to Remember features iconic performances by both Shane West and Mandy Moore in one of her earliest roles. Moore's musical performance is expected, but stellar. Perhaps more poignant for fans of tearjerkers are their matrimonial scenes. Be prepared to break out the tissues for this one.

Want More Romance Like A Walk to Remember ?

5 romance movies on Prime Video with 90% or higher on Rotten Tomatoes

Get ready to fall in love with these romance movies on Prime Video

Romance is just one of those genres you find yourself going back to, especially when you want something to make you feel happy on a stormy evening. Even though I’m a huge horror fan, I have no problem switching to the softer side of the entertainment industry, with slow-burn flicks and charming comedies to hold my attention. And yes, there are plenty of movies out there that aren’t just about cheesy romance and unrealistic relationships. 

We’ve gathered a few of the best romances on Prime Video , with the help of Rotten Tomatoes . Even though this review aggregation site includes the consensus of professional critics, it won’t always determine your opinion. Our team only uses it as a guide when choosing what romance movies to watch. 

Now, if you’re itching to get into a good juicy romance, we’ve got you covered. Check out the five best romance movies on Prime Video with 90% or higher on Rotten Tomatoes below.

‘Música’ (2024)

“Música” is a unique romance movie that focuses on the neurological condition synesthesia, which involves hearing music or seeing shapes when processing normal sensory information. A young man named Rudy (Rudy Mancuso) experiences this, and it’s causing havoc in his daily life when he can’t concentrate on his girlfriend and classes. However, one day he meets Isabella (Camila Mendes), and she creates a new tune that is like music to his ears. Now, he must find a way to accept the love, deal with his condition, and manage the pressure of Brazilian culture.

Watch on Prime Video  

‘La La Land’ (2016)

In one of the most well-loved romances, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) find one another during the lowest points of their careers. Sebastian wants to become a successful jazz musician while Mia desires to be an aspiring actress. However, their exhausting and boring jobs stop them from getting where they need to be in life. “La La Land” shows how these two determined people fall in love, but it also represents the meaning of the right person at the wrong time. The harder they work to achieve their dreams, the more distant they become as their love starts to waver.

Watch on Prime Video

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‘Past Lives’ (2023)

“Past Lives” follows the classic romance trope of friends to lovers, but in a much more beautiful way. Two deeply connected childhood friends Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) must part ways when Nora’s family leaves South Korea to live somewhere else. Over 20 years later they reunite in New York, but Nora is already married to another man. Hae Sung now has to confront the idea of love and destiny, all while dealing with his growing feelings for Nora. This heartrending modern romance isn’t what you think, and it’s a movie you have to experience for yourself. 

‘West Side Story’ (2021)

The romance musical “West Side Story” is an adaptation of the musical back in 1957. Steven Spielberg wanted to create something truly special about forbidden love during a time where street gangs desired control. In New York, Tony (Ansel Elgort) instantly falls in love when he sees María (Rachel Zegler) at a school dance. Their growing romance only fuels the anger and determination between two gangs called the Jets and Sharks. But a passionate love like that will always have obstacles, and some dangerous risks. This is a great movie to watch if you need that extra bit of tension. 

‘Brooklyn’ (2015)

Throwing it back to finding love in the 1950s again, we have “Brooklyn”. This movie focuses on a young Irish immigrant named Ellis (Saoirse Ronan), who must find her purpose in Brooklyn. Becoming homesick and somewhat lost, Ellis begins to worry, but that fear soon fades away when meets Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen). Settling down as a bookkeeper and continuing the blossoming romance with Tony helps her feel at home. All good things must come to an end though, right? And that’s especially true for Ellis, as she discovers her sister has died and she must return home. But that instantly strains her new relationship with Tony, causing even more problems. 

More from Tom's Guide

• 5 best classic movies just added to Prime Video with 95% or higher on Rotten Tomatoes
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Alix is a Streaming Writer at Tom’s Guide, which basically means watching the best movies and TV shows and then writing about them. Previously, she worked as a freelance writer for Screen Rant and Bough Digital, both of which sparked her interest in the entertainment industry. When she’s not writing about the latest movies and TV shows, she’s either playing horror video games on her PC or working on her first novel.

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11 Free Romance Movies You Can Stream Right Now

You can’t put a price on love.

• Featured image via 'Breakfast a Tiffany's.' Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures

Sometimes, you just want to sit down and watch a good romantic movie. But in the age of streaming, that means managing tons of log-ins and subscription fees—and perhaps you've just ditched your usual Netflix romance movies after they raised prices. 

If you’re tired of all the hassle, this is the list for you! These free romance movie are streaming at no cost right now. So sit back, relax, and enjoy some priceless romance.

This article will be updated periodically to reflect changes to streaming.

Free Romance Movies on Tubi

10 things i hate about you.

• Photo Credit: Touchstone Pictures

This modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew follows sisters Kat (Julia Stiles) and Bianca (Larisa Oleynik). 

Bianca isn’t allowed to date anyone until Kat finds a boyfriend, so she enlists the help of resident bad boy Patrick (Heath Ledger) to woo Kat into a relationship. But will Patrick be able to charm her into letting her guard down? 

RELATED: The Best Teenage Romance Movies Ever

• Photo Credit: Film4 Productions

When Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) meets the glamorous Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), they feel an instant pull to each other. The two begin a forbidden love affair, but Carol’s impending divorce threatens to destroy what they have. 

The Bodyguard

• Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

After threats from a stalker escalate to a bomb exploding in award-winning actress and music star Rachel Marron’s (Whitney Houston) dressing room, her manager decides she needs extra protection. 

Enter former Secret Service agent Frank Farmer (Kevin Costner). Rachel is initially annoyed by Frank’s strict security procedures, but as the threats continue to come, they grow closer. 

In addition to the thrilling romance in the movie, The Bodyguard ’s soundtrack produced two Whitney Houston standards, “I Have Nothing” and the iconic “I Will Always Love You.” 

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Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

• Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures

Still hung up on his ex-girlfriend, Nick O’Leary (Michael Cera) meets Norah Silverberg (Kat Dennings) at his band’s gig. 

After he pretends to be Norah’s boyfriend, they discover a shared love for indie bands and set off on a quest to find the location of a secret concert of their favorite band. As morning creeps closer, the two will have to face the music about their growing feelings for each other.

RELATED: The Best Meet-Cute Moments in Romance Movies

P. S. I Love You

• Photo Credit: Alcon Entertainment

When her husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) dies, Holly (Hilary Swank) can’t fathom how she can move on with her life. Then, on her 30th birthday, she receives a letter from Gerry, the first of many he arranged to be sent to her. 

Over the course of the next few months, Gerry’s letters encourage Holly to find a way to embrace life and love again.

Free Romance Movies on YouTube

Breakfast at tiffany’s.

• Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures

When aspiring writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard) meets Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), he is instantly intrigued. 

All Holly wants is to marry a rich man, live the life of a socialite, and put her past behind her. But as Holly and Paul explore New York together, neither one can deny the spark between them.

This so-wacky-it-works cult classic stars real-life couple Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and their obvious chemistry is what makes this movie so fun. Joanna is an obnoxiously rich woman who hires Dean, a local carpenter, to build her a closet on her yacht. When she's unhappy with the wood used (despite never specifying what she wanted), Joanna refuses to pay Dean.

Later, Joanna falls off her yacht, and her husband couldn't care less. After seeing Joanna on the news and finding out she has amnesia, Dean decides to make her pay him back—he's claims her as his wife "Annie" and puts her to work cooking, cleaning and raising his kids. And soon enough, the prank turns into something much more.

Related: 6 Unforgettable Amnesia Romance Movies

Free Romance Movies on Pluto

But i’m a cheerleader.

• Photo Credit: Ignite Entertainment

This cult comedy classic follows Megan (Natasha Lyonne), a high school cheerleader whose life is turned upside down when her parents accuse her of being a lesbian and send her away to True Directions, a conversion therapy program. 

There she meets the rebellious Graham (Clea DuVall), who insists that her sexuality can’t just be cured. As Megan comes to terms with who she really is, she discovers that she’s falling for Graham.

Free Romance Movies on Amazon

• Photo Credit: Focus Features

Based on the Jane Austen classic, this modern adaptation stars Anya Taylor-Joy as the eponymous meddling heroine. Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever and rich—and far too busy trying to make a match for her friend Harriet to realize her own love story is unfolding, too.

Related: 15 Must-Read Romance Books for Fans of Jane Austen

My Secret Billionaire

• Photo Credit: Vision Films

Obviously, there are tons of cheesy romance movies in the category, but this one is one of favorites. My Secret Billionaire uses the common trope of one romantic interest hiding who they really are—and even though we all know exactly how this will go, we love to watch it happen.

Related: 10 Millionaire and Billionaire Romance Books

Love, Simon

• Photo Credit: Fox 2000 Pictures

Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) knows he’s gay, but he’s not quite ready to come out for fear that it will change how his parents and friends think of him. One night, he learns he’s not the only closeted student at his school when an anonymous poster known only as “Blue” makes an online confession. 

As Simon goes through the highs and lows of his senior year, he keeps in contact with Blue and develops feelings for him. He then begins a quest to discover Blue’s true identity and hopefully, to have a shot at love.

RELATED: 15 Books for Fans of Love, Simon

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The 45 Best Sexy Romantic Movies With Steamy Love Scenes

These love (read: sex) scenes from romantic films are equal parts sensual and swoon-worthy.

• Best Steamy Sex Scenes
• Best Sex Scenes in Thrillers
• Best Romantic Sex Scenes

You know how some people like to say "love scene" as a euphemism when they're talking about a hot, titilating, sex scene? If the phrase "love scene" makes you roll your eyes or cringe a little, hear us out, because sometimes it's actually the most appropriate pair of words in the world to describe what plays out on our screens. Yes, sometimes sex scenes are  porn movie -worthy pure, carnal expressions of lust, but some of the hottest sex scenes in movies are actually tender, sensual, and—dare we even say it—romantic. If you're in the mood for a romance film that showcases the art of making love in the all-caps, L-O-V-E sense of the word, then your Google sleuthing has led you to precisely the right place: this list.

We've dug deep into the annals of pop culture for examples of movies that truly illustrate the difference between "having sex" and "making love." You know, the kinds of movies that will make your heart flutter and your stomach fill with those first love butterflies. From obvious old school love stories like  Dirty Dancing  and  From Here to Eternity  to modern classics like  Titanic  and  The Notebook  with even a few under-the-radar (but still eternally worthy) indie picks thrown into the mix, we've compiled a definitive guide to movies with romantic AF (no pun intended), but still insanely sexy sex scenes. Here are the most romantic, not cheesy, totally sensual, quote-unquote "love scenes" in movie history.

Hot, Steamy Sex Scenes

Y tu mama tambien.

Diego Luna? Gael Garcia Bernal? Lots of road trip sex scenes and beautiful Mexican vistas? Yes please. Of course, this movie is more than just a coming-of-age film about two boys and the slightly older woman who teaches them about sex. It's also poignantly thoughtful, about the way even things that seem like they'll last forever inevitably change. But, you know, the sex scenes. 

9 1/2 Weeks

Though it was considered too sexy for American audiences when it was released in 1986 and got a heavy edit before hitting theaters, this film starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Bassinger follows a finance bro and an art gallerist whose love affair starts out pretty straight-laced, but who soon start delving into their kinks in the bedroom. It flopped when it first came out, but has become a cult classic in the years since. 

A member of the English Parliament played by Jeremy Irons (as a sexy silver fox, btw) starts an affair with his son’s gorgeous French fiancee (Juliette Binoche). Because as we all know, forbidden sex is the hottest sex.

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Below Her Mouth

Set over the course of three days, this sexy, sexy movie follows two women, Jasmine and Dallas, as they fall in love with each other. The love scenes are passionate and steamy AF.

Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine  is not a movie for the faint of heart. The film's plot goes to some pretty dark places, but the scenes of Dean ( Ryan Gosling ) and Cindy's (Michelle Williams) early, happy days are pure romance (and lust).

And speaking of cult classics (though this one was just a beloved indie film from the jump), Secretary is a weird little movie about a boss and his secretary—shocking, I know—who realize they share a love of BDSM. Because what's more romantic than hopelessly unfulfilled people happening upon the only other person they know who's into the same stuff they are? And Maggie Gyllenhaal is brilliant in it, of course.

Fifty Shades Freed

The final installment in the  Fifty Shades  trilogy saw Ana become Mrs. Grey and take a lot more agency in her sexual relationship with Christian. The romance is in the fact that both parties are fully into what's going on in the bed and satisfied with the partnership.

Do the Right Thing

Two words: Ice. Cubes.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour

The love scenes between Adèle and Emma in  Blue Is the Warmest Colour  exude love and romance (and sexiness. Also lots of sexiness).

Disobedience

Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams star in this powerful story about a woman, Ronit (Weisz), who returns to her estranged Orthodox Jewish community after the death of her father, the community’s rabbi, and slowly rekindles an old romance with McAdams’ Esti, who’s now married to a rabbi herself. It’s a very slow burn, but their climactic (literally!) sex scene is a moving depiction of the bond between the two women, and of female pleasure, too.

Thrilling and Romantic Sex Scenes

Mostly a drama (so if you don't want things to get way too real, feel free to skip the ending), this movie about a wife who strikes out on an affair is also extremely steamy. Seriously, the sex scenes between Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez are next-level. 

James Bond has always been known as a ladies' man and a sex symbol and the shower love scene between Daniel Craig's take on the iconic super spy and Sévérine in  Skyfall  shows how 007 keeps earning his rep, over and over.

Eyes Wide Shut

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were a real-life couple when they starred in this film. Honestly, it's a weird Stanley Kubrick movie that involves a now-infamous surrealist sex party scene, but the chemistry is palpable between the leads.

Gangster Squad

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have sizzling onscreen chemistry (a fact they've proven multiple times now), but their sly flirtation (and steamy post-coital makeout) in  Gangster Squad  was, well, the highlight of the movie  Gangster Squad .

Helen might have been the cause of the Trojan War, but in the 2004 film  Troy,  it's the love scene between Achilles and Briseis (played by Brad Pitt and Rose Byrne, respectively) that will really get you hot and bothered.

Is there anything hotter than forbidden love? If you think there is, you clearly haven't watched the library love scene between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in  Atonement  recently.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Sometimes there's a fine line between love and hate—and no movie has ever captured that fact better that  Mr. and Mrs. Smith , particularly in the scene in which married rival spies Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie literally destroy their damn house fighting and making love. 

Super-Romantic Love Scenes

This slow, silhouetted love scene in  Top Gun  will  actually  take your breath away.

The Photograph

A woman (Issa Rae) falls in love with the journalist investigating her mother’s storied photography career, and despite her own estrangement with her mom, she rediscovers their relationship while creating a totally different one. This film is as romantic as it is super steamy. 

The Notebook

As adults, most of us know that things that look like fantastic, romantic ideas on the big screen are kind of a disaster in real life. No matter how wise you are in the ways of romance, however, the kissing-in-the-rain scene from  The Notebook  will make you lust for a thunderstorm and a Gosling of your very own.

Romeo + Juliet

There's a lot to love about Baz Luhrmann's 1996 adaptation of  Romeo and Juliet , but the pool scene tops the list—even if it's not the moment the characters actually consummate their forbidden love.

Legends of the Fall

Legends of the Fall  will make you feel lots of feels, but the sexy love scene between Tristan and Susannah is one of the movie's most romantic (and steamiest) moments.

Jerry Maguire

You had me at hello...and also at this oh-so-sensual sequence.

Love Jones  explores the age-old question: When you hook up on the first date and want to keep things casual but end up falling in love, what do you do?

Wet Hot American Summer

Yes,  Wet Hot American Summer  is a sex comedy spoof, but there's some real heart (and sexiness) in the tender moments Ben (Bradley Cooper) and McKinley (Michael Ian Black) share in the tool shed.

The Lucky One

Shower sex is impractical and outdoor shower sex is even more so, but it's swoon-worthy in this Zac Efron romance.

Love & Other Drugs

In  Love & Other Drugs , Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal deliver perfect performances as a couple whose no strings attached situationship evolves into something much deeper.

Jason's Lyric

Jada Pinkett Smith and Allen Payne star in this 1994 romantic drama about a young couple dealing trying to balance love and maturity. Their love scene in the woods is slow, passionate and HOT.

Boys Don't Cry

In 1999's  Boys Don't Cry , Hilary Swank plays a young trans man (true representation was definitely still a rarity when the film was made) who enjoys a tender night with the girl of his dreams (played by Chloë Sevigny). The movie includes some very steamy, very romantic oral expressions of affection by a lake.

From Here to Eternity

By modern standards, the love scene in  From Here to Eternity  is tamer than tame. By 1953 standards, though, the beachside passion of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster is hot, hot, hot (and romantic, to boot).

Coming Home

Sex scenes featuring characters living with disabilities are, well, rare to say the least. That's just  part  of what makes the love scene between Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in  Coming Home  so special. The other part? Jon's character brings Jane's to climax via cunnilingus—making this a  very  rare display of female pleasure in film for the 1970s. 

Out of Sight

Does it get sexier than J.Lo and George Clooney getting it on? The 1998 movie  Out of Sight  proved that no, it does not.

Love & Basketball

Love & Basketball  tells a decades-spanning love story and the scene when the movie's leads, Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps), make love for the first time is romantic, real, and iconic.

Romantic love scenes don't have to be about penetrative sex or even oral sex. They don't even have to involve nudity. The scene in which Chiron sits on the beach with his male classmate, who touches him for the first time, proves all of the above.

Pretty Woman

Speaking of impractical places to have sex,  Pretty Woman's  piano scene (in a public hotel restaurant, no less) will make you want a baby grand.

Cruel Intentions

Who knew that a love scene between a girl and the guy who bet that he could take her virginity could turn out to be so romantic? The key, of course, is that Sebastian really fell for Annette (and the real-life love between Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon didn't hurt either).

The famous pottery-making scene between Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze is probably also less sexy and romantic (and more messy) in real life, but man does it look dreamy on screen.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 2

It took four movies, but Bella and Edward finally tied the knot and consummated their relationship in a night of sweet-turned-intense honeymoon sex.

The illicit love scene between Jack and Kate in  Titanic  made foggy window handprints a symbol of eroticism and romance for an entire generation.

Brokeback Mountain

The tender tent scene in  Brokeback Mountain  will go down in history as one of the most romantic movie love scenes of all time. Bonus points for showing that true love knows no barriers when it comes to identity or sexuality.

Before Sunrise

Everything about  Before Sunrise  is romantic in that early-20s kind of way, but the love scene in the park epitomizes the romance (and romanticization) of the characters' brief encounter. 

Dirty Dancing

Baby and Johnny's love story is one of the great movie romances of our (or any other) time, and their love scene is as sensual as we ever could have hoped for.

The English Patient

In this epic romance, a badly burned cartographer (Ralph Fiennes) is hospitalized in 1944, telling his nurse (Juliette Binoche) the story of his love affair with the married Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) before World War II broke out. He doesn’t spare many details: The movie is full of passionate love scenes between Fiennes and Thomas that are sure to make you swoon—just like Katharine did when she needed an excuse to leave a Christmas party and meet up with her secret lover.

Red, White & Royal Blue

Red, White & Royal Blue , which is based on Casey McQuiston’s novel of the same name, is already a truly delightful rom-com of the “giggling and kicking your feet” variety, as it’s all about a secret romance between the First Son of the United States and the prince of England. But the film has also made headlines for its refreshingly accurate portrayal of gay sex—as depicted in a series of wildly passionate and sweetly tender moments between Alex and Henry.

The Fault in Our Stars

Precisely engineered to tug every last heartstring, The Fault in Our Stars is the heartbreaking story of two teenage cancer patients (played by Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort) who fall in love. A major chunk of the movie sees the duo travel to Amsterdam on a Make-a-Wish-style trip, with the knowledge that it could very well be one or both of the teens’ last trips ever. So, while there, they decide to check another item off the bucket list. Their first time is awkward and honest and giggly and sweet, which really adds to the whole “doomed romance” thing.

Kayleigh Roberts is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional experience. Her byline has appeared in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic, Allure, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, Bustle, Refinery29, Girls’ Life Magazine, Just Jared, and Tiger Beat, among other publications. She's a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

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The 24 Best Romantic Movies on Netflix Right Now (May 2024)

Looking for a good love story? We've put together the best romance movies streaming on Netflix right now, from rom-coms to tear-jerking dramas to something a little sexier. Netflix has been leaning into their own original romantic content in recent years, so there are plenty of new releases to check out, but there are also some bonafide classics, award-winners, and box office hits in the mix. So without any further ado, settle in for meet-cutes, public professions of love, mind games, romantic gestures, slow dances, seductions, and all the classic romance movie beats.

If you didn't find quite what you're looking for here, check out the Best Movies on Netflix or Best Rom-Coms on Netflix .

Disclaimer: These titles are available on US Netflix.

Editor's note: This article was updated May 2024 to include Mother of the Bride.

'Mother of the Bride' (2024)

Rotten tomatoes: 13% | imdb: 4.8/10, mother of the bride.

Release Date May 9, 2024

Director Mark Waters

Cast Michael McDonald, Sean Teale, Chad Michael Murray, Rachael Harris, Benjamin Bratt, Wilson Cruz, Miranda Cosgrove, Brooke Shields

Runtime 88 Minutes

Genres Drama, Romance, Comedy

Directed by Mark Waters and written by Robin Bernheim , Mother of the Bride is a romantic comedy film that kicks off when Emma ( Miranda Cosgrove ) surprises her mother, Lana ( Brooke Shields ), with the news of her engagement. As mother and daughter head to Phuket, Thailand, for the wedding, things take a turn for the worse when it turns out the groom’s father is Lana’s ex-boyfriend ( Benjamin Bratt ). The movie also features Sean Teale , Chad Michael Murray , and Rachael Harris in supporting roles. Cast in the now-familiar mold of the Father of the Bride movies, Mother of the Bride has had largely unfavorable reviews from critics, with Shields and Cosgrove’s performances receiving some criticism. However, if you’re in the market for a silly Netflix rom-com, Mother of the Bride does not disappoint. Set in a beautiful and lavish setting and just funny enough to keep you amused, it’s a cute movie that’s great for casual comfort watching.

Watch on Netflix

'Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga' (2020)

Rotten tomatoes: 63% | imdb: 6.5/10, eurovision song contest: the story of fire saga.

Release Date June 26, 2020

Director David Dobkin

Cast Melissanthi Mahut, Dan Stevens, Rachel McAdams, Will Ferrell

Runtime 123 minutes

Genres Romantic Comedy, Musical

A goofy yet poignant Netflix Original comedy, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga stars Rachel McAdams and Will Ferrell as a pair of Icelandic singers with dreams of winning the Eurovision Song Contest. Directed by David Dobkin ( Shanghai Knights ), the film was written by Will Ferrell and Harper Steele . Besides the two leads, Eurovision Song Contest also stars Dan Stevens , Graham Norton , Demi Lovato , and Pierce Brosnan .

You might not expect Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga to be one of the most touching and romantic movies of 2020, but one should never underestimate the power of Rachel McAdams. The Mean Girls and Game Night star proves once again that she's one of the most underrated comedic actors of her generation. The movie is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but the big surprises here are the fabulously catchy original songs and the unexpected tenderness between the laughs that might just leave you with a tear in your eye and warmth in your heart. That's not just because of the love story, but that's sure a big part of it.

'Love Is in the Air' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes: 25% | imdb: 5.6/10, love is in the air.

Release Date September 28, 2023

Director Adrian Powers

Cast Simon Brook McLachlan, Delta Goodrem, Roy Billing, Joshua Sasse

Runtime 88 minutes

Directed by Adrian Powers from a script by Caera Bradshaw and Katharine McPhee , Love Is in the Air is a laugh-a-minute rom-com about seaplane pilot Dana Randall ( Delta Goodrem ), who finds love in the unlikeliest of places, with her romantic partner, William ( Joshua Sasse ), initially intending to bring Dana’s business to the ground. The film’s talented cast also stars the likes of Mia Grunwald ( Romance at the Vineyard ) and Roy Billing ( The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ).

In Love Is in the Air , romance in whimsical abundance is the order of the day as the central pair’s delightful chemistry is brought to life. While the film received largely negative reviews from critics, it’s just the sort of easy story that makes for a fun romantic movie night. Ticking all of the genre’s many boxes, Love Is in the Air is a gentle flight with little turbulence, with its great cast helping to ease the film into its satisfying landing.

'Happiness For Beginners' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes: 33% | imdb: 6.1/10, happiness for beginners.

Release Date July 27, 2023

Director Vicky Wight

Cast Shayvawn Webster, Luke Grimes, Ellie Kemper, Blythe Danner

Runtime 103 minutes

Adapting the popular novel by Katherine Center , Vicky Wight ’s Happiness For Beginners is a movie that reminds us that it’s never too late to rediscover and redefine who we are. Ellie Kemper ( Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt ) plays Helen, a recent divorcée who decides to join a survivalist hike along the Appalachian Trail in an attempt to become someone other than the lonely woman she sees in the mirror. On the trip, she reconnects with an old friend of her brother’s (played by Luke Grimes ), who gives her a new perspective on the way she wants to live her life.

While the film received a mixed response from critics, this romantic comedy is very cute, and Kemper and Grimes have such easy yet electric chemistry on screen, it sucks you in instantly. Happiness for Beginners is carried by that chemistry and the performances of the whole cast. If nothing else, this movie is worth watching if you’d like to see Ellie Kemper take on a role that’s drastically different from the cheerful, bright-eyed young women she usually plays.

'The Perfect Find' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes: 69% | imdb: 5.1/10, the perfect find.

Release Date June 23, 2023

Director Numa Perrier

Cast Gina Torres, Keith Powers, Gabrielle Union, La La Anthony

Runtime 99 minutes

Written by Leigh Davenport , directed by Numa Perrier , and based on the novel by Tia Williams , The Perfect Find is a romantic comedy following Gabrielle Union ( The Perfect Holiday ) as Jenna Jones, a woman in her 40s trying to rebuild her life and career after a very public breakup and firing. On her journey to get a new job and find love, Jenna meets a younger man in his 20s, played by Keith Powers ( Before I Fall ), who makes her reevaluate what she truly wants out of life. Unfortunately, her new beau turns out to be the son of her domineering new boss ( Gina Torres ), which forces her to choose between the career she’s always wanted and the man who inspired her to pursue it.

The Perfect Find premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2023, where it won the Audience Award for Narrative Feature. The film has received positive reviews from critics, especially for the chemistry between the movie’s two leads. If what you’re looking for is a low-key but comfy romance film, then The Perfect Find is, well, the perfect find.

'A Tourists Guide to Love' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes: 67% | imdb: 5.7/10, a tourists guide to love.

Release Date April 21, 2023

Director Steven K. Tsuchida

Cast Scott Ly, Ben Feldman, Rachael Leigh Cook, Missi Pyle

Runtime 94 minutes

Genres Romance, Comedy, Adventure

Rachael Leigh Cook ( She’s All That ) and Scott Lý star in A Tourist’s Guide to Love by director Steven Tsuchida . The movie follows an executive named Amanda Riley (Cook), who travels to Vietnam to learn about the country’s tourism industry. There, she meets a charming and charismatic tour guide named Sinh Thach (Lý). Rounding out the cast of the cute romantic comedy are hilarious actors, including Ben Feldman and Missi Pyle .

Through a delightful story of resilience written by Eirene Donohue , A Tourist’s Guide to Love dives headfirst into themes of heartbreak and second chances. While the movie received mixed reviews from critics, its charismatic, likable characters and catchy soundtrack make A Tourist’s Guide to Love an entertaining journey.

'Your Place or Mine' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes: 30% | imdb: 5.7/10, your place or mine.

Release Date February 10, 2023

Director Aline Brosh McKenna

Cast Ashton Kutcher, Zoe Chao, Reese Witherspoon, Jesse Williams

Runtime 109 minutes

Genres Romance, Comedy

Aline Brosh McKenna ’s directorial debut film Your Place or Mine follows long-distance best friends Debbie Dunn ( Reese Witherspoon ) and Peter Coleman ( Ashton Kutcher ) as they swap cities and get a taste of the other's daily struggles. While Peter takes care of Debbie’s son in Los Angeles, Debbie pursues a dream of hers in New York. However, when Debbie falls for the smooth and handsome Theo Martin, played by Jesse Williams , it reframes their whole relationship in a way neither Debbie nor Peter could have foreseen. The film boasts a great supporting cast featuring the likes of Zoë Chao , Tig Notaro , and Steve Zahn .

Though it didn’t quite capture the hearts of critics, Your Place or Mine has proven to be fairly popular with audiences, bringing in over 80 million views since its debut on Netflix. Reminiscent of iconic romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail , this coast-to-coast rom-com has a lot of heart and will bust your gut with the incredible cast of comedians sprinkled throughout.

'Good on Paper' (2021)

Rotten tomatoes: 50% | imdb: 5.6/10, good on paper.

Release Date June 23, 2021

Director Kimmy Gatewood

Cast Iliza Shlesinger, Ryan Hansen

Runtime 1 hr 32 min

Written by and starring comedian Iliza Shlesinger , Good on Paper is a romantic comedy about a stand-up comic named Andrea (Shlesinger) who meets Dennis ( Ryan Hansen ), a man who seems to check all her boxes. But as she gets to know him, Andrea begins to realize Dennis might not be who he says he is. Kimmy Gatewood ’s directorial debut, this awkwardly funny rom-com also boasts a brilliant supporting cast, which includes legend Margaret Cho and GLOW alum Britney Young .

The film’s delightfully charming premise is based on an unfortunate real occurrence in Schlesinger’s life. Good on Paper is a carefully crafted hour-and-a-half film full of chemistry between the entire cast. The story transitions well from a comedy routine to the screen by embracing the unconventional and finding humor in heartbreak and discomfort. Though critical reception to Good on Paper has been mixed, the unconventional plot and genre-breaking elements make it an entertaining watch.

'Holidate' (2020)

Rotten tomatoes: 45% | imdb: 6.1/10.

Release Date October 28, 2020

Director John Whitesell

Cast Andrew Bachelor, Jessica Capshaw, Luke Bracey, Kristin Chenoweth, Frances Fisher, Emma Roberts

Runtime 104

Emma Roberts ( American Horror Story ) stars alongside Luke Bracey ( Elvis ) in the Netflix original holiday rom-com Holidate , directed by John Whitesell and written by Tiffany Paulsen . The movie is centered on Sloane Benson (Roberts), who strikes a deal with Jackson (Bracey) to be each other’s holiday dates — without getting into a romantic relationship. As you might expect, this “perfect plan” falls apart when Sloane starts yearning for more. Besides its two talented leads, Holidate also features a stellar supporting cast that includes the likes of Jake Manley ( The Order ), Jessica Capshaw ( Grey’s Anatomy ), and the incomparable Kristin Chenoweth ( Schmigadoon! ).

A classic romantic comedy to the core, Holidate brilliantly balances hilarity with heartwarming moments, proving itself an adorable movie that charmingly exposes the familial and societal pressures that come with being single. Through a delightful journey of finding love, Holidate builds on the iconic and often cringe-worthy holiday movie tropes, allowing the two single strangers at the heart of the movie to find unexpected attraction and genuine chemistry.

'Look Both Ways' (2022)

Rotten tomatoes: 62% | imdb: 6.3/10, look both ways.

Release Date August 17, 2022

Director Wanuri Kahiu

Cast Aisha Dee, Lili Reinhart, Danny Ramirez

Runtime 110 minutes

Directed by Wanuri Kahiu and written by April Prosser , Look Both Ways is a romantic dramedy starring Lili Reinhart , Danny Ramirez , Luke Wilson , David Corenswet , and more. After Natalie (Reinhart) spontaneously sleeps with her friend Gabe (Ramirez), she has a pregnancy scare on her college graduation night. The film follows two different paths: what her life would look like if the test was positive and what it would be like if it was negative.

Look Both Ways is a funny, charming film that explores the notion of one decision having the power to change the trajectory of your life forever. The movie received generally favorable reviews from critics, and it has some compelling tales to tell, with the focus on Natalie’s career in addition to the romance providing a refreshing change.

'Persuasion' (2022)

Rotten tomatoes: 31% | imdb: 5.8/10.

Release Date 2022-00-00

Director Carrie Cracknell

Cast Richard E. Grant, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Cosmo Jarvis, Henry Golding, Suki Waterhouse, Dakota Johnson

Genres Drama, Romance

Based on the Jane Austen novel, Persuasion is a post-modernist historical romance starring Dakota Johnson ( Fifty Shades of Grey ) as Anne Elliot, a heartbroken woman who is presented with a second chance at true love. Directed by Carrie Cracknell and written by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow , the film features a brilliant British supporting cast — including the incomparable Richard E. Grant ( Loki ) and Crazy Rich Asians ’ heartthrob Henry Golding — in a classic romance story set in a bygone era.

Gorgeously costumed and filled with breathtaking scenery and landscapes, Persuasion is a feast for the eyes, revealing a grounded story intended to tug on the heartstrings and warm the soul. The movie’s use of modern elements like fourth-wall breaks has polarized audiences and critics; you’ll either love it or hate it, but those very elements are what add a fresh touch to Persuasion ’s well-tread story.

'Love & Gelato' (2022)

Rotten tomatoes: 22% | imdb: 5.2/10, love & gelato.

Release Date June 22, 2022

Director Brandon Camp

Cast Valentina Lodovini, Tobia De Angelis, Susanna Skaggs, Owen McDonnell

Based on the best-selling novel by Jenna Evans Welch , Brandon Camp ’s Love & Gelato follows 17-year-old Lina ( Susanna Skaggs ) as she tries to fulfill her mother’s last wish by venturing to Rome the summer before heading off to college. Although she’s a socially awkward and introverted person who would much rather spend the time back home, Lina takes on the challenge and finds more than she bargained for.

Love & Gelato is an adorable rom-com sure to appeal to Emily in Paris fans or anyone just looking for a lighthearted watch. The movie employs many beloved tropes of the genre – love triangles! Insta-love! An endlessly supportive bestie! – making it as sweet as its name. Bonus points for the beautiful cinematography showcasing Italy in all its glory.

'To All the Boys I've Loved Before' (2018)

Rotten tomatoes: 96% | imdb: 7.0/10, to all the boys i've loved before.

Release Date August 17, 2018

Director Susan Johnson

Cast Lana Condor, Anna Cathcart, Janel Parrish, Noah Centineo

Based on the novel by Jenny Han , To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a young adult rom-com directed by Susan Johnson and written by Sofia Alvarez . The movie follows Lara Jean ( Lana Condor ), a teenager whose worst nightmares are realized when five letters she wrote to her secret crushes are sent out without her knowledge. When she’s confronted by her old crush, Peter ( Noah Centineo ), she’s afraid it could get in the way of her current crush, Josh ( Israel Broussard ). Lara Jean and Peter resolve to fake a relationship so they can get with the people they really want to be with. Naturally, pretending to be together starts to create real feelings between the two.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before has received near-universal praise from both critics and fans, and it’s now developed into a franchise with two sequels and a prequel series. Easily one of the most popular romance films of the 2010s, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a joy from start to finish, letting you relive a time when who “liked” you was the most important thing in the world without any of the trauma high school entails. If you’re looking for a fun, sweet YA romance to brighten your day, you can’t do much better than this.

'Set It Up' (2018)

Rotten tomatoes: 92% | imdb: 6.5/10.

Two corporate executive assistants hatch a plan to match-make their two bosses.

Release Date June 15, 2018

Director Claire Scanlon

Cast Lucy Liu, Zoey Deutch, Taye Diggs, Glen Powell

Runtime 105 minutes

Claire Scanlon ’s charming rom-com Set It Up follows two beleaguered assistants ( Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell ) who decided to set up their bosses ( Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs , respectively) so they can get some precious free time away from their demanding jobs. However, with all their scheming, they start to fall for each other instead.

Written by Katie Silberman , Set It Up received generally favorable reviews from critics. If you’re looking for a charming romantic comedy but don’t want to rewatch something from yesteryear for the umpteenth time, you should definitely give this movie a shot. You can see the rom-com beats coming from a mile away, but they’re done so well and so effectively that you won’t mind. Plus, the film sizzles thanks to the outstanding performances from the dazzling Deutch and Powell, who should be the streaming generation’s Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks .

'Let It Snow' (2019)

Rotten tomatoes: 81% | imdb: 5.8/10, let it snow.

Release Date November 8, 2019

Director Luke Snellin

Cast Isabela Merced, Joan Cusack, Shameik Moore, Odeya Rush, Mitchell Hope, Kiernan Shipka

Runtime 92 minutes

Adapted from the YA novel of the same name by Maureen Johnson , John Green , and Lauren Myracle , Let It Snow is a breezy holiday rom-com that follows a series of overlapping love stories on one fateful Christmas season snow day. Directed by Luke Snellin , the movie stars Isabela Merced ( Dora and the Lost City of Gold ), Shameik Moore ( Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ), and Kiernan Shipka ( Chilling Adventures of Sabrina ) and was written by Kay Cannon , Victoria Strouse , and Laura Solon .

A bit of a Love Actually for the teen set, Let It Snow is a sweet film from top to tail, as interested in the dramas of teen friendship and domestic struggles as it is the blossoming romances. Even more, it's filled with delightful performances from a knockout cast of young up-and-comers. A lot of the Netflix Christmas romances follow in the Hallmark Channel vein, and absolutely no judgment if that's your preferred thing, but for those who want an old-fashioned feel-good holiday romance, Let It Snow is just the ticket.

'Alex Strangelove' (2018)

Rotten tomatoes: 81% | imdb: 6.3/10, alex strangelove.

Release Date June 8, 2018

Director Craig Johnson

Cast Kai Wes, Joshua Barragan, Brendan Archer, Michael Abela

Written and directed by Craig Johnson , Alex Strangelove is a romantic coming-of-age comedy film. Daniel Doheny stars as Alex Truelove, a high school senior and class president who is in a relationship with his best friend, Claire ( Madeline Weinstein ). The couple sets a date to have sex for the first time. As you can imagine, something happens to derail those plans, and that something is the charming, openly gay teenager Elliot ( Antonio Marziale ). After meeting him at a party, Alex starts to get closer to Elliot, which leads him to begin questioning his sexuality.

Alex Strangelove premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2018 and received largely positive reviews from critics. While the movie isn't particularly deep, it delivers a funny, enjoyable story about accepting yourself that's worth checking out. Yes, Alex Strangelove is a romantic comedy, which is how it got onto this list, but what makes the movie so endearing isn't so much the romance as it is the personal arc of the lead character.

'Someone Great' (2019)

Rotten tomatoes: 83% | imdb: 6.2/10, someone great.

After a devastating break up on the eve of her cross-country move, Jenny enjoys one last NYC adventure with her two best pals. Someone Great is a romantic comedy about love, loss, growth and the everlasting bond of female friendship.

Release Date April 19, 2019

Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

Cast Rebecca Naomi Jones, LaKeith Stanfield, DeWanda Wise, Gina Rodriguez, Brittany Snow

Pitched somewhere between a love story and a wild night-out comedy, Someone Great

is centered on a young woman ( Gina Rodriguez ) who heads out for one last crazy night with her best friends before leaving town. Oh, and she just got dumped by her boyfriend of seven years ( LaKeith Stanfield ). Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson in her directorial debut, the movie also stars Brittany Snow , DeWanda Wise , and Peter Vack .

Someone Great received generally favorable reviews from critics, with the performances being hailed as the movie’s highlight. Stanfield, in particular, is in peak charming mode in this film, and the chemistry he has with Rodriguez is a knockout, keeping you wrapped up in their love even though you know it's over. There's plenty of raunchy comedy to go around, but the dynamic between Rodriguez and Stanfield is what gives the film its heart and spark.

'The Incredible Jessica James' (2017)

Rotten tomatoes: 89% | imdb: 6.5/10, the incredible jessica james.

Release Date June 28, 2017

Director Jim Strouse

Cast LaKeith Stanfield, Noel Wells, Jessica Williams, Chris O'Dowd

Runtime 85 minutes

Genres Comedy

An indie rom-com written and directed by James C. Strouse , The Incredible Jessica James follows the fiercely independent title character as she navigates life after a breakup. An aspiring playwright living in New York City, Jessica James is trying (and failing) to get over her ex when she ends up on a blind date with a recent divorcé. Despite an awkward start, they end up hitting it off and set out to make their way through the post-breakup world together as best they can. The movie features the iconic Jessica Williams in the lead role and boasts an ensemble supporting cast that includes Chris O'Dowd , Noël Wells , and Lakeith Stanfield .

Sexy, funny, and decidedly modern, The Incredible Jessica James is a refreshing spin on the rom-com that doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator, and it received a lot of praise from critics for doing just that. The film was Jessica Williams’ first leading role after her tenure on The Daily Show , and she lights up the screen. Now, the character of Jessica James may not be quite as incredible as the title leads you to believe — she’s pretty selfish and naive — but she’s passionate, raw, and ambitious, and Williams makes you love her despite her faults. A supporting performance from the constantly charming Chris O’Dowd certainly doesn’t hurt, and the two have electric chemistry as they try to navigate the waters of heartbreak together toward something healthy and new.

'Always Be My Maybe' (2019)

Rotten tomatoes: 89% | imdb: 6.8/10, always be my maybe.

Release Date May 31, 2019

Director Nahnatchka Khan

Cast Ali Wong, Michelle Buteau, James Saito, Randall Park

Runtime 101 minutes

Starring Randall Park and Ali Wong , Always Be My Maybe follows a pair of teenage best friends who have since drifted apart and are pushed together once more in adulthood, even though their lives have followed very different paths. Directed by Nahnatchka Khan , the film was also co-written by Park and Wong alongside playwright and screenwriter Michael Golamco . Always Be My Maybe ’s ensemble cast also includes Michelle Buteau , James Saito , Vivian Bang , Daniel Dae Kim , and Keanu Reeves .

Netflix brought the rom-com back in a big way with 2018’s Set It Up , and Always Be My Maybe is similarly charming and delightful, finding success with both critics and audiences. Park and Wong are dynamite together, and the film takes time to breathe with some well-paced dramatic sequences. It’s also not lacking in scene-stealers, as Michelle Buteau is a hoot, and Keanu Reeves once again proves his talent knows no bounds.

'The Half of It' (2020)

Rotten tomatoes: 97% | imdb: 6.9/10, the half of it.

Release Date May 1, 2020

Director Alice Wu

Cast Wolfgang Novogratz, Leah Lewis, Alexxis Lemire, Daniel Diemer

Runtime 104 minutes

Written and directed by Alice Wu , The Half of It offers an update on the classic Cyrano de Bergerac . The film follows shy straight-A student Ellie Chu ( Leah Lewis ), who writes love letters for inarticulate school jock Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer) to woo the beautiful Aster Flores ( Alexxis Lemire ). What Paul doesn’t know is that Ellie is secretly in love with Aster herself.

Critically acclaimed and nominated for numerous awards, The Half of It is a brilliant exploration of three teenagers searching for their identity and hungry for their first love, all wrapped up in a messy, hungry love triangle that never feels cheap or exploitative. Gorgeously shot, expertly paced, and filled with characters you can't help but learn to love, Wu’s touching tale is a knockout, self-aware teen romance that's as bittersweet as the real thing.

The 14 Best Romantic Comedy TV Shows And How To Watch Them

Some all-time greats on this list...

If you were to pull up a list of the best sitcoms of all time, you wouldn’t have to scroll all that long before you found at least one romantic comedy TV show. Ever since the medium launched many decades ago, we’ve watched countless love stories unfold before our very eyes (or on reruns). From iconic first kisses to break-ups we still can’t get over to over-the-top wedding ceremonies, we’ve seen it all.

That said, we’ve put together a rather robust collection of the best romantic comedy TV shows from over the years and how you can watch them, either on some of the best streaming services or as a digital purchase with an Amazon subscription .

Fleabag (2016 - 2019) 

One of the most amazing Phoebe Waller-Bridge projects , Fleabag , the TV adaptation of her one-woman play of the same name, immediately became one of the influential small-screen romantic comedies upon its 2016 release. Whether she was bouncing from one bad decision to another or falling in love with a priest (played by Andrew Scott), Waller-Bridge’s titular lead remains one of TV’s best characters in recent memory.

Stream Fleabag on Prime Video.

Mad About You (1992 - 1999)

Paul (Paul Reiser) and Jamie Buchman (Helen Hunt) could very well be one of the best TV couples, as their relationship, like real-life couples, was full of ups, downs, and everything in between. That’s what made Mad About You so much fun to watch. You were going to get laughs, romance, and just about every other emotion in under 30 minutes.

Buy Mad About You on Amazon.

How I Met Your Mother (2005 - 2014)

Though How I Met Your Mother had its share of characters that were repulsive human beings , this is honestly what gave the long-running sitcom a lot of its signature charm. Just about everyone in the How I Met Your Mother cast either broke someone’s heart, broke a promise, or broke themselves by the time it was said and done, and that’s okay!

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Stream How I Met Your Mother on Hulu.

Emily In Paris (2020 - Present)

Would Emily in Paris be as much fun to watch if there wasn’t an element of romance each season? Yeah, most likely. However, Emily Cooper's ( Lily Collins ) love affairs with hunks like Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) and Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) have added so much electricity to this outrageously bingeable Netflix series . They don’t call Paris the “City of Love” for no reason, after all. 

Stream Emily in Paris on Netflix. 

Will & Grace (1998 - 2006; 2017 - 2020)

Will & Grace , a show with LGBTQ+ characters who made an impact , is also one of the funniest and most honest romantic comedies in the history of TV. Though Eric McCormack and Debra Messing ’s titular characters’ relationship never went beyond friends, there was still plenty of romance throughout the show’s run (and its revival series) with talk of dating, marriage (and divorce), and other matters of the heart.

Stream Will & Grace on Hulu. Stream Will & Grace (Revivial) on Hulu.

Catastrophe (2015 - 2019)

Catastrophe , an outstanding romantic comedy series created by Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney (who star as Sharon and Rob Norris), takes audiences on a wild ride with two people who go from strangers to husband and wife with two kids after a one-night stand turns into a lifelong commitment. It’s brash, but it’s honest, especially when it comes to the impact children have on a relationship.

Stream Catastrophe on Prime Video.

Sex And The City (1999 - 2004)

One of the shows that helped put HBO on the map, Sex and the City found the perfect balance of romance and friendship as well as comedy and drama with its focus on four New Yorkers trying to find their place in the world. With outstanding narration by Sarah Jessica Parker ’s Carrie Bradshaw, each episode was like a new adventure where anything could happen (and it usually did).

Stream Sex and the City on Max.

Never Have I Ever (2020 - 2023)

No matter whether you were on Team Ben or Team Paxton , there’s a good chance you watched and loved Never Have I Ever . If not, now’s a good time to watch Mindy Kaling ’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy about a high school student named Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) as she tries to make sense of the world around her. Four seasons of teenage angst, awkwardness, drama, and revelations make this a show you just have to watch.

Stream Never Have I Ever on Netflix.

Friends (1994 - 2004)

One of the most iconic sitcoms ever created, Friends covered just about everything during its historic run on NBC, including some all-time great romances. Whether it’s Monica and Chandler’s relationship or the on-again-off-again romance shared by Rachel and Ross, there was no shortage of love.

Stream Friends on Max.

Insecure (2016 - 2021)

Issa Rae became one of the biggest and most powerful figures in TV thanks to her incredible HBO romantic comedy-drama series, Insecure . Between 2016 and 2021, this highly influential black-led series welcomed audiences into the head and heart of the comedian with her awkward and lovable Issa Dee. Careers, friendship, and plenty of romantic relationships fill up this show’s five seasons.

Stream Insecure on Max.

New Girl (2011 - 2018)

Zooey Deschanel was already one of the most beloved actresses when New Girl debuted on Fox in 2011, but the sitcom about the life and times of Jessica “Jess” Day took her to the next level. From the early days of getting over an ex to starting an on-again-off-again relationship with her roommate, Nick Miller (Jake Johnson), there was no shortage of romance (and comedy) on this beloved show.

Stream New Girl on Hulu.

You're The Worst (2014 - 2019)

If you’re in the mood for a romantic comedy TV show that’s less lovey-dovey and instead has a harder edge, then You’re the Worst is the route to take. After meeting at a wedding and agreeing not to make things serious (or complicated), Jimmy Shive-Overly (Chris Geere) and Gretchen Cutler (Aya Cash) quickly discover it won’t be that easy. 

Stream You’re The Worst on Hulu.

Lovesick (2014 - 2018)

A Netflix show that not enough people talk about , Lovesick spent three seasons diving into the relationship shared by Dylan Witter (Johnny Flynn) and Evie Douglas (Antonia Thomas) as they go from strangers to roommates to friends to lovers. It’s not all cheery, as the pair experience all kinds of obstacles throughout their journeys, both with their shared bond and outside relationships.

Stream Lovesick on Netflix.

Love (2016 - 2018)

Co-created by Judd Apatow , Love spent three seasons traversing the increasingly complicated relationship between Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Paul Rust), two people who couldn’t be more different. Despite their differences, they try their hardest to make things work, even if it doesn’t make sense.

Stream Love on Netflix.

If you’re all caught up on these great TV shows, there’s always our breakdown of the best romantic comedy movies worth checking out. And, don’t forget to look at our updated 2024 TV schedule for all the latest on other shows coming to the small screen soon.

Philip grew up in Louisiana (not New Orleans) before moving to St. Louis after graduating from Louisiana State University-Shreveport. When he's not writing about movies or television, Philip can be found being chased by his three kids, telling his dogs to stop barking at the mailman, or chatting about professional wrestling to his wife. Writing gigs with school newspapers, multiple daily newspapers, and other varied job experiences led him to this point where he actually gets to write about movies, shows, wrestling, and documentaries (which is a huge win in his eyes). If the stars properly align, he will talk about For Love Of The Game being the best baseball movie of all time.

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10 Most Intense Romance Movies of All Time

Love hurts.

Oftentimes, entering into a romance-focused movie can mean a breezy, perhaps even light-hearted viewing experience awaits. This is especially the case when it comes to romantic comedies, which are, by and large, very entertaining and mostly charming films that are unapologetic about providing escapism and romantic fantasies. Such rom-coms - and some romantic dramas - may have some more serious or emotional moments, but they're rarely films that could be described as intense.

That makes the occasional tense romance movie all the more worthy of praise and attention, because some films that largely revolve around romantic relationships can also serve as disquieting dark comedies or even thrillers . The following romantic movies are all quite intense and disquieting in their own ways, whether that be because they get dark in places, they aim to thrill/unnerve, or because they get truly psychological. Such films might not be easy to watch, but they are all gripping.

10 'Punch-Drunk Love' (2002)

Directed by paul thomas anderson.

Adam Sandler's best-known non-comedy role is probably that of a man dangerously addicted to gambling in the tense and unnerving Uncut Gems , though another well-regarded (semi) dramatic performance of his is found in Punch-Drunk Love . Like Uncut Gems 17 years later, Punch-Drunk Love also has a disquieting energy to it and can prove quite stomach-churning to watch, though in a more subtle way than the more crime/thriller-focused Uncut Gems .

Punch-Drunk Love is a romantic comedy of sorts, though the comedy is darker than you'd expect from most rom-coms . Sandler plays a very awkward and sometimes very angry man who finds little success in life, until he meets a woman (played by Emily Watson ) who he feels genuine feelings for. It's got the sort of unpredictable tone and distinctive style to it that you'd expect from Paul Thomas Anderson , and though such an approach might not be for everyone, it does ensure Punch-Drunk Love is, at the very least, hard to forget.

Punch-Drunk Love

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9 'Titanic' (1997)

Directed by james cameron.

There's an argument to be made that James Cameron was already king of the (blockbuster) world before the release of Titanic , but this 1997 epic was a step above anything he'd done before when it came to things like the box office and awards recognition. Much of its first half plays out like a relatively straightforward romantic story set on the doomed titular ocean liner, with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio playing characters from different social backgrounds who nevertheless fall in love.

Regrettably, the film is called Titanic , though, which means that at a point, the ship's going to hit an iceberg and the film will feel more like a disaster movie than a romance one. The second half largely deals with the Titanic sinking, and it pulls surprisingly few punches when it comes to depicting the physical and psychological impacts of being involved in such an event. It's to Cameron's credit that the film somehow works and packs an emotional punch, despite - or perhaps because of - having two rather different halves.

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8 'Waves' (2019)

Directed by trey edward shults.

One of many great small-scale films released by A24 , Waves is oddly comparable to the aforementioned Titanic in the way that it functions like a film of two halves. Without giving too much away, the first half centers mostly on one pair of people who find their relationship tested after a series of harrowing events, and the second half pivots to focusing on a different pair of people who find themselves drawn to each other, and slowly falling in love.

Unlike Titanic , however, Waves has most of its truly intense moments take place in the more explosive and haunting first half, with the second being emotional, sure, but certainly not as nerve-wracking. It's also perhaps more of a drama than a romance film , but it does still qualify as something that crosses over into both genres, largely because each half of Waves has a prominent relationship that gets showcased, with the first half being about the end of one relationship and the second half being about the potential beginning of another.

Rent on Apple TV

7 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (2004)

Directed by michel gondry.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is quite remarkable, as it manages to be an iconic romance film , a harrowing psychological drama, and something of a sci-fi movie all at once. It also has a remarkably original premise, as it revolves around two people who were once in love, but then both turned to having a strange procedure that aims to erase all memories of an ex-partner from one's mind. It's this concept that makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind feel distinctly sci-fi in nature.

It's also one of those romance movies that's more about a break-up than something more traditionally lovely and romantic , though the procedure does lead to both characters feeling conflicted and doubtful of their decisions. It's a surreal, harrowing, and sometimes challenging film, but also a hugely impressive and haunting one that's likely to leave a mark on anyone who watches it, particularly those who feel as though they've loved and lost (allegedly, that's better than having never loved at all).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

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6 'The Handmaiden' (2016)

Directed by park chan-wook.

Park Chan-wook has made numerous great films , with many of them definable as psychological thrillers or gritty action/crime movies. The Handmaiden sees him playing to his strengths while also directing a movie with a more romantic story than most of the things he'd made before , with the plot here centering on two people who aim to swindle a Japanese heiress to get her fortune in the 1930s.

However, genuine romantic feelings arise between two people involved in the scheme, which naturally throws off the plan in a series of thrilling and intense ways. The Handmaiden is certainly a passionate and oftentimes tense movie, with love being found in a complex and dangerous place, leading to a good deal of suspense throughout. It's a unique ride of a film where the less said about the plot, the better, though it's safe to say The Handmaiden can be both romantic and nerve-wracking.

The Handmaiden

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5 'Blue Valentine' (2010)

Directed by derek cianfrance.

While Blue Valentine is centered on a relationship, it's much more of a drama film overall , and a particularly riveting and sometimes even stomach-churning one. The two people at the center of Blue Valentine are Dean ( Ryan Gosling ) and Cindy ( Michelle Williams ), and it becomes clear early on that their relationship has seen better days. They get married, but each has personal flaws that complicate their relationship and put it in continual jeopardy as the story goes on.

As a romance film, Blue Valentine is an exceptionally dark and uncompromising one, with the drama here feeling raw and uncomfortably believable at times, thanks to Gosling and Williams both delivering spectacularly authentic performances. This all makes it far from a breezy or easy watch , but those who want to see something that feels undeniably real and brilliantly acted ought to give this 2010 film a shot, so long as they're prepared for things to get full-on.

blue valentine

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4 'The Graduate' (1967)

Directed by mike nichols.

Even though Mike Nichols directed many memorable movies , there's a strong argument to be made that one of his earliest - 1967's The Graduate - was always his very best. It's an intentionally awkward coming-of-age dramedy about a young man who's recently graduated from college and has little idea of what to do with his life. He then proceeds to make a bad situation worse by entering a strange relationship with the mother of a young woman his parents would like him to have a relationship with.

Its dark sense of humor and willingness to be brutally honest about certain things means The Graduate might not be a romantic movie, but it is a romance movie, as relationships are a key part of the narrative here. It gets more intense as it goes along, with certain parts getting awkward enough that they have the potential to unnerve viewers and make them feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

The Graduate

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3 'Miracle Mile' (1988)

Directed by steve de jarnatt.

Miracle Mile is certainly an eclectic and somewhat strange film, as it dips its toes into many seemingly disparate genres all at once. It manages to be both a comedy and a thriller at the same time , with its dark sense of humor pairing well with an anxious story about the end of the world. Beyond being a comedy/thriller, Miracle Mile's also a drama, romance, and sci-fi movie, in various ways, having a narrative about two people in L.A. who fall in love right when the world's about to end, thanks to nuclear war.

There's a ticking clock element to the narrative, with the doomed lovers trying to have a first date while the human race is facing imminent extinction. It's a very odd but ultimately quite engaging movie, with the stakes being so high that it's hard to watch it without feeling nervous throughout, even though the relationship at the film's center is sweet and endearing.

Watch on Tubi

2 'Scenes from a Marriage' (1974)

Directed by ingmar bergman.

Ingmar Bergman was a fascinating and exceptionally talented filmmaker whose work generally couldn't be described as "easy to watch." As such, when he made a movie all about a married couple in 1974 called Scenes from a Marriage , it ended up being an unsurprisingly harrowing viewing experience. It's about a relationship, sure, but one that's continually less happy with every passing sequence, making this one romance film that wouldn't be good for a date night .

Scenes from a Marriage is largely made up of extended, sometimes even grueling sequences where the married couple argue in increasingly full-on ways , and the film plays out over close to three hours. Further, there's a longer miniseries cut that was actually released the year before the theatrical cut, with that one running for close to five hours. It also got an American adaptation in 2021, with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac playing the roles that Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson respectively played in the original 1973 and 1974 versions.

1 'Breaking the Waves' (1996)

Directed by lars von trier.

It's fair to say that Breaking the Waves is a romantic movie by Lars von Trier standards, though the infamous Danish filmmaker is known for his harrowing and disturbing movies . As such, it's also fair to say that Breaking the Waves is not a fun movie and gets expectedly depressing throughout, with its premise centering on a man who, after getting paralyzed in a work accident, insists his wife should have extramarital affairs to "keep" the sexual side of their relationship going, in a way.

Complications naturally arise from this situation, with Breaking the Waves ultimately feeling equal parts tragic and emotionally intense. Still, for as difficult as parts of the film can be, it's also quite absorbing and genuinely moving, and benefits greatly from having two strong performances at its center , courtesy of Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård .

NEXT: The Best Anxiety-Inducing Comedies of All Time

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Marketing maven Kelly Jones wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis's already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fa... Read all Marketing maven Kelly Jones wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis's already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up. Marketing maven Kelly Jones wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis's already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up.

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Who does cressida cowper marry in ‘bridgerton’ her romance differs in the books.

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Bridgerton. (L to R) Joanna Bobin as Lady Cowper, Dominic Coleman as Lord Cowper, Jessica Madsen as ... [+] Cressida Cowper in episode 304 of Bridgerton.

With the arrival of Bridgerton Season 3, the first four episodes centers on Penelope and Colin’s transition from friends to lovers while highlighting Francesca Bridgerton’s debut into society. However, an unexpected main player this season is regal mean girl Cressida Cowper. Read on to learn more about Cowper’s love story in Bridgerton and who she marries in the books .

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Bridgerton Season 3 and Julia Quinn’s book, “An Offer From A Gentleman.”

Cressida Cowper (portrayed by Jessica Madsen) was introduced in Season 1 during Daphne’s debut. Despite unsuccessful romances with Prince Friedrich and Jack Featherington, she remains hopeful for a courtship her third time around. Facing pressure from her parents to marry, she becomes set on the the wealthy yet eccentric Lord Debling, who is more interested in Penelope.

Cowper continues her bullying in Season 3, mainly targeting Penelope and Lord Debling’s courtship, but her character begins to pull back layers with the help of Eloise. Their unlikely friendship — driven by Eloise’s fallout with Penelope after discovering her identity as Lady Whistledown — surprisingly works. Eloise’s candidness allows Cressida to reflect on her toxic behavior.

Bridgerton. (L to R) Jessica Madsen as Cressida Cowper, Claudia Jessie as Eloise Bridgerton in ... [+] episode 301 of Bridgerton.

For instance, in a moment of vulnerability, Cressida confides in Eloise about her struggles. She admits to feeling lonely and finding it hard to make friends. “It has been difficult to find a husband,” she shares with Eloise, “it has been more difficult still to find a friend.”

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Madsen expanded on her character’s evolution in a recent interview with StyleCaster . “We’ve seen her [Cressida] break down, and I don’t mean break down in the sense of falling to pieces, but we’ve seen her open up and I think once you open, you’re receptive to change,” the actress explained. “I hope that by the end of the season, people don’t forget the beginning.”

Given Cressida Cowper’s family wealth and status, one would expect her to have a suitor by now — and in the books, she does. However, Netflix’s Bridgerton series has taken a slightly different approach to Madsen’s character by delaying her love story for a later time.

Who Does Cressida Cowper Marry In the Bridgerton Books?

Bridgerton. (L to R) Joanna Bobin as Lady Cowper, Jessica Madsen as Cressida Cowper in episode 303 ... [+] of Bridgerton.

In Julia Quinn’s third book in the “Bridgerton” series, titled “An Offer From A Gentleman,” Cressida eventually marries a nobleman named Lord Twombley (a character not yet introduced in the show). While some might wonder why she didn’t end up with Lord Debling after he rejected Penelope, Debling was a character created for the show and does not exist in the novels.

In “An Offer From A Gentleman,” Cressida Cowper marries Lord Twombley before Colin and Penelope’s love story unfolds in the fourth book, “Romancing Mister Bridgerton.” Unfortunately, Cressida’s husband dies, leaving her a struggling widow.

It’s currently unclear how the show will handle Cressida Cowper’s marriage to Lord Twombley or if his character will be introduced in part two or future seasons. Some fans are even hoping for a deviation from the books where Cressida is queer and enters into a relationship with another woman, possibly Eloise.

When asked by Decider about the fandom’s queer-coded read into Cressida and Eloise’s friendship, she responded that she would “absolutely love that.” She continued, “That would be the best! Yeah, I mean, that would be cool. I like to think it would make sense because, like, she hasn’t bagged a guy. So, like, why not a gal? But yeah, I have really no idea.”

A relationship with Eloise may be unlikely, considering the fifth book, “To Sir Phillip, With Love,” revolves around Eloise’s romance with Sir Phillip Crane. Fans will have to wait and see what direction Cressida’s love life will take.

Bridgerton Season 3, part one, is now streaming on Netflix. The second part will be released on June 13, 2024.

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