This list has been updated to reflect Netflix’s current offerings.
Romantic comedies: They make us laugh, they make us cry, they make us laugh at how much we cried. We’ve rounded up the best romantic comedies on Netflix from the high periods of the late ’80s, mid-’90s, and early aughts to the current renaissance of low-budget rom-coms. You may remember some of them from our lists of the 25 best romantic comedies since When Harry Met Sally, the 27 best indie rom-coms, and eight mumblecore rom-coms, but, hey — if a movie’s good, why recommend it only once?
13 Going on 30
Year: 2004
Runtime: 1 hour 38 minutes
Director: Gary Winick
Stars: Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo
As a middle-schooler fast-forwarded into the body of her fully grown self, Jennifer Garner has to sell a lot: hitting on a child, falling for a grown man despite possessing the mental capacity of a barely pubescent girl, doing the “Thriller” dance. But with an indefatigable, chirpy sense of pluck, goshdarn it if she doesn’t get the job done, guilelessly smiling her way into the heart of a tousled Mark Ruffalo. The emotional logic can be shaky, reliant on Garner’s contrition for and resolution of mistakes she hasn’t made yet or perhaps never will. (And anyone with a background in media will get a good laugh from the film’s notion of the goings-on at a women’s-magazine office.) But hey, isn’t there a part in every one of us that just wants to be 30, flirty, and thriving?
Anyone But You
Year: 2023
Runtime: 1 hour 43 minutes
Director: Will Gluck
Stars: Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell
In our current crisis of IP saturation and the collapse of the mid-budget star vehicle, there’s something appealing and anomalous about a roundly likable original-concept rom-com pitched straight down the middle. And yet for the slight air of the old-fashioned in its sensibility, Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are unmistakable as 21st-century screen idols, their fine-tuned physical perfection tempered by an unpretentious earnestness. Any date-night movie shows some hubris by invoking Titanic, but this one has the good sense to be self-deprecating about it, Sweeney’s order to “Titanic me!” on the ship’s prow played as a goofy ruse rather than an attempt to capture the original’s magic — just one example of an overall winning shrewdness in the film.
Hit Man
Year: 2023
Runtime: 1 hour 55 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Glen Powell and Adria Arjona
The true story of a mild-mannered philosophy professor going undercover as a killer for hire on behalf of his local police department may not sound like the stuff of lovery-dovery, but everything clicks into place once Glen Powell’s chameleonic poseur takes a meeting with a troubled young woman trying to get out from under her abusive husband’s thumb. The volcanic chemistry between Powell and Adria Arjona, erupting in a Notes-app role-play game that threatens to burn a hole through the screen, reorients the film’s primary focus from its criminal plot to its subtext about discovering your best self in someone else. Finding the right match can turn any one of us into a new person, and our man Gary gradually learns that it doesn’t even require prosthetic makeup.
Maid in Manhattan
Year: 2002
Runtime: 1 hour 45 minutes
Director: Wayne Wang
Stars: Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes
This millennial video-store staple may not boast the sterling wit of the screwball classics that begat it, but it’s got two important things going in its favor. One is the friction between the haves and have-nots, an old and sturdy foundation on which to build a specific, meaningful tension between two people with differences posing a real test to their attraction. The other is Jennifer Lopez, who has carried more terrible scripts than all the agency couriers of Los Angeles combined, comporting herself with grit, warmth, and good humor as she lets down her walls for Nixon-loving Mr. Big substitute Ralph Fiennes. (And then, of course, there’s the third character in their courtship: That’s right, folks, I’m talking about New York City!)
No Hard Feelings
Year: 2023
Runtime: 1 hour 43 minutes
Director: Gene Stupnitsky
Stars: Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman
You ever hear the one about the 30-something screwup who tries to seduce a shy teenage boy as part of a surreptitious sex–for–Buick Regal deal with the kid’s parents because they’re so concerned about him being a dork virgin? A logline that could’ve turned out like a deranged incel daydream evades the potential catastrophe by instead dialing up the sentimentality, ultimately delivering wholesome truisms about being true to yourself and living life to the fullest. When Jennifer Lawrence isn’t full-frontally beating the bejesus out of insouciant hoodlums, that is. The well-measured ratio of cringe-factor raunch to kindhearted pathos doesn’t quite hit an Apatovian high, but it’s up there.
Notting Hill
Year: 1999
Runtime: 2 hours 4 minutes
Director: Roger Michell
Stars: Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant
Screenwriter Richard Curtis elevates the pedestrian daydream of “Ordinary fella lands movie star” with help from a never-better Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, a study in opposites — a stammering, bookishly handsome bookseller versus, well, Julia Roberts — that go together perfectly. Grant in particular runs away with the show, the epitome of British charm in his rumpled wardrobe, dry wit, and refined gentlemanly manners. We can’t help but want them to end up with each other, the truest mark of a successful romcom.
Om Shanti Om
Year: 2007
Runtime: 2 hours 42 minutes
Director: Farah Khan
Stars: Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone
Farah Khan’s tribute to Bollywood classics of the ’70s begins with a lovelorn background extra (the incomparable Shah Rukh Khan) losing his crush (Deepika Padukone) in a fire and then his life in a car crash. Flash-forward 30 years, and his reincarnated form teams up with an exact doppelgänger of his lost darling (S.R.K. and Padukone, both on double duty) to expose her killer. In addition to a rollicking musical, a savvy inside-baseball send-up of the Hindi film industry, and a celebration of cinephilia as a sustaining life force, this nearly three-hour hunk of movie is a love story stretching across decades and lifetimes.
Set It Up
Year: 2018
Runtime: 1 hours 45 minutes
Director: Claire Scanlon
Stars: Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell, Taye Diggs, and Lucy Liu
Netflix has been vocal about its objective to revive the rom-com, but this feather-light trifle is the only original production that comes close to the genre’s ’90s glory. We’ve got a winning duo in Zoey Deutsch and Glen Powell, a novel premise in their scheme to get their evil bosses (Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs, both killing it) off their respective backs by tricking them into a fling, some primo escapist-bait Big Apple scenes, and some sturdy joke construction affirming that the art form has not yet completely died out. It all goes down easy and without leaving the sour aftertaste of lowered standards.
She’s Gotta Have It
Year: 1986
Runtime: 1 hours 28 minutes
Director: Spike Lee
Stars: Tracy Camilla Johns, Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell and Spike Lee
Armed with a minuscule budget, an encyclopedic knowledge of political and cinema history, and an unbeatable soundtrack mixing plaintive jazz with proto-hip-hop, Spike Lee stepped on the scene with this daring paean to female sexual empowerment. Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) likes juggling her three boyfriends (Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell, and Lee himself as motormouthed Mars Blackmon), so she has to get crafty as they all try to lock her down in monogamy. It’s the “single and loving it” valentine’s pick, a gesture of solidarity to empowered women who’d rather get off than get cuffed.
Spanglish
Year: 2004
Runtime: 2 hours 11 minutes
Director: James L. Brooks
Stars: Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, and Paz Vega
James L. Brooks’s caustic comedy of family and class hits like a dark chocolate in reverse, the bitterness giving way to a faintly sweet finish. Adam Sandler, in one of his precious few dialed-back performances, plays a chef drawn to his decent housekeeper (Paz Vega) over his cruel wife (Téa Leoni). There are no swells of violins or soft-focus lip-locks here, just the difficult yet rewarding work of relating to another human being across society and circumstance’s dividing lines. For those who prefer romances of the unrequited, yearning variety, here’s your movie.
This Is 40
Year: 2012
Runtime: 2 hours 14 minutes
Director: Judd Apatow
Stars: Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd
Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up sorta sequel joins fan faves Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) as they tremble on the precipice of middle age, hoping to restore the spark to a long-term marriage that was already fueled by animosity when first we saw them. Through their arguments and near indiscretions and further arguments (and an exceptional supporting turn from Megan Fox), they remember the lesson that forms the bedrock of all relationships going the distance: You need someone who’s there when the chips are down, in the unsexy moments that make up everyday life.
Top Five
Year: 2014
Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes
Director: Chris Rock
Stars: Chris Rock and Rosario Dawson
Of the many films endeavoring to re-create the miracle of Before Sunrise — that two people walking around and talking about whatever for 12 or so hours could somehow constitute one of the most rapturous displays of romance ever committed to celluloid — Chris Rock’s distinguishes itself by dint of its insider-y vantage on showbiz. As Rock’s sobered-up, self-loathing movie star spends a day getting interviewed by loquacious journalist Rosario Dawson, the script makes time for an inventory of the myriad indignities packaged with stardom, from pushy fans to insulting press junkets to the gnawing guilt of lucrative hackdom. Mostly, though, it’s just a pleasure to wander Manhattan while we listen to their flirting, bullshitting, and confessing.