Best Romance Movies

Casablanca to Brokeback Mountain. The love stories that earned the genre's most-coveted slot: the rewatch.

Romance is, like horror, an under-rated category in the critical conversation. The most-respected romance films tend to be the ones that complicate the form — that refuse the happy ending, or interrogate what the audience wants from the genre.

Our ten picks across eighty years of romantic cinema.

The ten

  • Casablanca (1942) — The most-quoted romantic screenplay ever written.
  • Before Sunrise / Before Sunset / Before Midnight (1995–2013) — Richard Linklater's trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Eighteen years of two characters' lives across three films.
  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — Charlie Kaufman's screenplay and Michel Gondry's direction make the case for memory loss as romantic device.
  • In the Mood for Love (2000) — Wong Kar-wai. Two neighbours in 1960s Hong Kong whose spouses are having an affair with each other.
  • Annie Hall (1977) — Woody Allen. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress.
  • Brokeback Mountain (2005) — Ang Lee. Wyoming, 1963 to 1983.
  • Moonlight (2016) — Barry Jenkins. Best Picture. A three-part character study in which the romance is the through-line.
  • La La Land (2016) — The most commercially successful original musical of the 21st century, and its central romance is its argument.
  • Punch-Drunk Love (2002) — Paul Thomas Anderson. Adam Sandler. The strangest American romance of its decade.
  • Past Lives (2023) — Celine Song's debut. Two childhood friends, twenty-four years apart.

Why the form has been hard to make recently

The middle-budget American romance — the genre that gave us When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and Notting Hill (1999) — has all but disappeared from cinemas. The form has migrated to streaming and to television, which is part of why the most successful recent theatrical romances (La La Land, Past Lives) lean toward formal ambition rather than the comfort beats the studio system once specialised in.

The international romance, meanwhile, has had a strong decade. In the Mood for Love is now widely considered the greatest romance film of the 21st century. Past Lives extended that tradition. Foreign-language romance is having a moment that mainstream American romance is not.