Guides
The Best Romance Movies, Sorted by Whether You Want to Feel Good or Feel Something
There are two kinds of romance film and putting on the wrong one is a real mistake. This guide sorts sixteen of the best by which experience you are actually after.
Hero image: In the Mood for Love (artwork via TMDB)
Key takeaways
- In the Mood for Love is the best romance ever made and almost nothing happens in it.
- Romance splits cleanly into two moods: the ones that leave you lighter and the ones that leave you hollow.
- Picking the wrong category is the most common movie night mistake in this genre.
- The greatest romances are usually about restraint rather than consummation.
The romance genre has a sorting problem. "Romantic film" covers both When Harry Met Sally, which will make your evening better, and In the Mood for Love, which will leave you staring at a wall for an hour afterward. Both are excellent. They are not substitutes.
So this list is split by outcome. First the films that leave you lighter, then the ones that leave you hollowed out, with a note on which is which before you commit.
The greatest, and it is not a comfortable watch
In the Mood for Love (2000)
- 1h 39m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Drama, Romance
Leaves you: devastated. Wong Kar-wai's film is the best romance ever made and its central couple never act on anything. Two neighbours in 1962 Hong Kong discover their spouses are having an affair with each other, and begin meeting to work out how it started.
The restraint is the entire film. They rehearse conversations they will never have. They practise confrontations that never happen. The spouses are never shown on screen, only heard, which keeps the focus entirely on the two people not doing anything.
Christopher Doyle's photography is the most beautiful in any film on this page: narrow corridors, patterned wallpaper, cigarette smoke, and Maggie Cheung in a series of cheongsams that function as a calendar of the film's emotional state.
The Shigeru Umebayashi waltz theme recurs so often it becomes almost unbearable. 98 minutes, and the final sequence at Angkor Wat is one of the great endings in cinema.
Watch it if: you want the best the genre has produced and you accept it will cost you.
Leaves you lighter
When Harry Met Sally... (1989)
- 1h 36m
- TMDB 7.4/10
- Comedy, Romance, Drama
The best romantic comedy ever written and the one every subsequent entry in the genre is measured against. Nora Ephron's screenplay follows two people across twelve years as they repeatedly meet, argue, become friends, and eventually stop pretending.
The structure is why it works. Most romantic comedies keep their leads apart with a misunderstanding that a single conversation would resolve. This one keeps them apart because they genuinely are not ready, and the twelve-year span makes that credible.
The interstitial documentary-style interviews with older couples, all of them scripted and performed, give the film its argument: that this is ordinary, that everyone has a version of it, and that the specific mechanics do not matter.
96 minutes, endlessly quotable, and it has aged better than almost any comedy of its era.
Watch it if: you want the genre's benchmark. This is the safest recommendation on the page.
Amélie (2001)
- 2h 2m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Comedy, Romance
Leaves you: delighted. A shy Parisian waitress decides to arrange small acts of intervention in other people's lives, and eventually has to face the possibility of one of her own.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet shoots a Paris that does not exist, saturated in green and gold, with a visual density that rewards pausing. The film is constructed out of small specific details, everyone's likes and dislikes announced in rapid montage, which is a device that should be exhausting and instead becomes the film's charm.
Yann Tiersen's accordion and piano score is inseparable from it.
122 minutes. It is unashamedly whimsical, which is either delightful or grating with very little middle ground.
Watch it if: you want to feel better than you did two hours earlier.
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
- 2h 8m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Drama, Romance
Leaves you: satisfied. Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation is the most purely pleasurable period romance ever filmed, and its innovation was texture: mud, sweat, chickens in the yard, and a Bennet household that is visibly not wealthy.
That grounding is what makes the restraint land. When the emotional register is naturalistic, a hand flexing after brief contact carries the weight that a declaration would in a stagier version.
The dawn sequence on the moor is unfaithful to Austen and completely justified. Dario Marianelli's piano score does an enormous amount of work.
127 minutes. Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen are both very good, and the film is considerably funnier than its reputation.
Watch it if: you want a period romance that is not stiff.
Before Sunrise (1995)
- 1h 41m
- TMDB 8.0/10
- Drama, Romance
Leaves you: hopeful. Two strangers meet on a train and spend one night walking around Vienna talking. That is the entire film.
It works because the conversation is genuinely good. Richard Linklater and his two leads wrote the dialogue collaboratively, and it moves the way real conversations do: circling, showing off, occasionally landing on something true by accident.
The listening booth scene, in which neither can look directly at the other, is the best-observed moment of attraction in cinema.
101 minutes. Its sequel Before Sunset is the better film and is covered in our under 90 minutes guide.
Watch it if: you want the most talkative romance ever made and you like being in the room for it.
Leaves you hollowed out
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
- 2h 1m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Drama, Romance
A painter is hired to produce a wedding portrait of a young woman who refuses to sit, so she must observe her in secret and paint from memory. Céline Sciamma made a film about looking, and about what it means to be the one being looked at.
The formal discipline is remarkable. There is no score at all except for two sequences, and because of that both are overwhelming when they arrive. There are almost no men on screen. The camera work is patient and frequently static.
The final shot, which holds on a face for a very long time while a piece of music plays, is the most emotionally efficient ending in modern cinema.
122 minutes and there is not a wasted frame in it.
Watch it if: you want the most formally perfect romance of the last decade.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
- 1h 48m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Science Fiction, Drama, Romance
Charlie Kaufman's screenplay about a man having a former partner erased from his memory, and changing his mind partway through the procedure while it is happening inside his own head.
Michel Gondry shot the memory sequences with practical in-camera techniques rather than digital effects: lighting changes, physical set removal, and actors leaving frame mid-sentence. That handmade quality is why the disintegration feels sad rather than clever.
Jim Carrey gives the best performance of his career precisely by not performing, and Kate Winslet is playing against the manic-pixie archetype the film is often accused of endorsing. Clementine explicitly rejects it in dialogue.
The ending is not a happy one and is frequently misremembered as one. 108 minutes.
Watch it if: you want the smartest film ever made about why people repeat themselves.
Past Lives (2023)
- 1h 46m
- TMDB 7.7/10
- Drama, Romance
Celine Song's debut, and the quietest devastation on this page. Two childhood friends in Seoul are separated by emigration, reconnect online twelve years later, and finally meet in person twelve years after that.
Nothing dramatic happens. Nobody betrays anyone, nobody is a villain, and the film's entire tension is the distance between a life being lived and a life that stopped being available.
The final act is essentially one long conversation between three people in a bar, and its most affecting element is how kind everyone is. The husband is not an obstacle. He is simply a person who can see what is happening.
106 minutes, and the last five are among the best in recent film.
Watch it if: you want to be quietly taken apart with no villain to blame.
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
- 2h 14m
- TMDB 7.8/10
- Drama, Romance
Ang Lee adapting Annie Proulx's short story about two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming, across twenty years of a relationship neither can name.
The film's power is in what is withheld. Ennis, played by Heath Ledger, barely speaks, and the performance is built almost entirely on a clenched jaw and a refusal to finish sentences. The tragedy is not persecution from outside so much as the internalised impossibility of imagining another life.
The final scene, involving a shirt in a wardrobe, is one of the most devastating endings in American film.
134 minutes.
Watch it if: you want a love story where the obstacle is entirely internal.
Carol (2015)
- 1h 58m
- TMDB 7.5/10
- Romance, Drama
Todd Haynes adapting Patricia Highsmith, set at Christmas in 1952 New York. A shop assistant and an older woman going through a divorce meet across a counter.
It is shot on Super 16mm, frequently through windows and rain and reflections, so you are constantly watching these women through something. That is the film's method: everything is obstructed, observed, or overheard.
Rooney Mara's performance is the more remarkable of the two, built almost entirely on watching. Cate Blanchett gets the glamour and Mara gets the film.
118 minutes, and the final shot is a masterclass in ending on exactly the right frame.
Watch it if: you want the most beautifully constructed film on this page.
Six more, both moods
Casablanca is the most quoted film ever made and its ending is the reason: a romance that resolves by choosing something other than romance. Titanic is genuinely well made and has been slightly damaged by its own ubiquity. Notting Hill is the best British romantic comedy and the seasons-changing walk is a superb piece of visual storytelling. Call Me by Your Name contains the single best monologue about heartbreak ever written, delivered by a father to his son. La La Land is a musical about two people who make each other better and cannot stay together, and its final sequence is exceptional. And The Handmaiden is the most romantic film in our Korean cinema guide, though it arrives via a con and a great deal of cruelty.
Pick by mood, not by rating
| You want to feel | Watch | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| Happier than when you started | When Harry Met Sally... | 96 min |
| Charmed | Amélie | 122 min |
| Warm and satisfied | Pride & Prejudice | 127 min |
| Hopeful about strangers | Before Sunrise | 101 min |
| Quietly wrecked | Past Lives | 106 min |
| Completely hollowed out | In the Mood for Love | 98 min |
| Like arguing about it after | Eternal Sunshine | 108 min |
The pattern in the great ones
Look at the top of this list and notice how little happens. In the Mood for Love is about two people who do not act. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about looking. Past Lives is about a conversation. Brokeback Mountain is about a man who cannot say a sentence. Before Sunrise is a walk.
Restraint is the genre's most reliable technique, and the reason is structural: desire is only interesting while it is unresolved. The moment a romance consummates, it has to find something else to be about, which is why so many films in this genre have a weak final third.
The great ones either stop before that point or make the not-happening the subject. That is also why so many of them are short. Six of the sixteen here run under 110 minutes.
For more, our feel-good comedies guide covers the lighter end, best coming of age movies covers first love specifically, and the romance catalog has the wider list.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best romance movie of all time?
In the Mood for Love, in which the central couple never act on their feelings and the entire film is about restraint. When Harry Met Sally... is the best romantic comedy and the safer recommendation if you want to feel good afterward.
What is the best romantic comedy?
When Harry Met Sally..., by a clear margin. Nora Ephron's screenplay keeps its leads apart because they genuinely are not ready rather than through a misunderstanding, which is why it holds up when almost none of its imitators do.
What is a good romance movie for a date?
When Harry Met Sally..., Notting Hill, or Pride & Prejudice. All three leave you in a better mood. Avoid In the Mood for Love, Past Lives, and Brokeback Mountain unless you both want to be quietly devastated.
What is the saddest romance movie?
In the Mood for Love, Past Lives, and Brokeback Mountain are the three most likely to leave you hollowed out. None of them contain a villain, which is part of why they land so hard.
Why do so many great romances end without the couple together?
Because desire is only dramatically interesting while it is unresolved. A film that consummates its romance must find a new subject, which is why so many have weak final acts. The best ones either stop early or make the not-happening the subject.
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Ratings, runtimes, and artwork come from TMDB and can change over time. teasertrack is a free discovery site, not a streaming service: every pick links to its full movie page where you can check trailers, cast, and current availability.
