18 Best Romantic Movies on Netflix Right Now
Editor’s Note: This post is updated monthly. Bookmark this page and come back every month to stay up to date with the best romance movies on Netflix.
Updated for August 2017
Romance movies are not that different from horror movies. Both are incredibly hard to pull off, are heavily watched during a cold time of year, and hopefully end with every character covered in blood.
To honor the effort behind crafting a good romantic movie, we are highlighting 16 from Netflix available for your streaming pleasure. Watch with your significant other or your favorite body pillow. Save them for this Valentine’s Day or just any day when you need Bridget Jones to assure you it’s all going to be okay.
Chasing Amy
Back when Chasing Amy came out in the ’90s, it was largely known as the “Ben Affleck falls in love with a lesbian” movie. While the base-level of the plot is exactly that, Chasing Amy covers so much more about love than just sexual politics. It’s about male insecurity and all of the other human emotions that make finding and maintaining love so difficult. It’s a wonderfully human tragi-rom-com with a bittersweet, yet entirely logical ending.
Love Actually
Love Actually is so closely associated with romance films, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas that it’s almost a self-parody at this point. This is a picture that has been picked apart for comedic and memeable scraps time and time again since its debut in 2003. Still, it holds up as a genuinely sweet, mega-omnibus love story. It doesn’t hurt that Love Actually also features the most impressive roster of British acting talent this side of a Harry Potter movie.
The African Queen
Certainly one to file under the classics section for all-time great movie romances is The African Queen. While in this particular John Huston masterpiece, neither the gin joint airs of Ingrid Bergman or the real-life crackle of Lauren Bacall are available to Humphrey Bogart, the film is nevertheless another hardboiled love story for the iconic movie star. And it is a sweetly unconventional one too.
In his element as a salty riverboat captain sailing up and down Ulanga River, Bogie’s Charlie is a wreck, but he is also prince charming for Katharine Hepburn’s Rose Sayer, an “old maid” who is doing missionary work with her brother when World War I breaks out. After Germans kill her sibling, Rose reluctantly attempts to escape down the river with Charlie, striking up an unlikely romance along the way. They also strike upon an even more unlikely adventure as instead of fleeing, they decide to battle the Germans in the name of dear old England! This is a jolly good adventure that is as authentic in Bogart and Hepburn’s chemistry as it is in its real, unforgiving African locations that were used.
The Graduate
The Graduate is pound for pound one of the best movies of all time. Thank Mike Nichols every day for sharing his creative brilliance with us. It’s also a profound, if atypical romance film. It’s the classic story of boy meets girl’s mom, then meets girl, and then suffers through crushing ennui from the pressures of adulthood and rapid societal changes in the 1960s. The end righftully gets a lot of attention as a classic moment in cinema history. Watch it for yourself and decide if you find it to be utlimately cynical, human, or even hopeful.
Blue is the Warmest Color
Blue is the Warmest Color is categorized as a coming-of-age film and a romance movie. Ultiamtely, those two genres are roughly the same. What is a more important or poignant way to come of age than to fall in love? Adele is a young Frenchwoman who likes to gossip about boys until one day she sees another young woman with blue hair walking past. What follows is infatuation, romance, heartbreak, jealousy, confusion, late nights, comfort, and disappointment. You know, love.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Bridget Jones has become the archetype for normal, yet lonely female movie characters everywhere. Bridget Jones Diary, itself, is the archetype for some many romance movies that followed it. Bridget (Renee Zellwegger) is a normal, softspoken woman who is largely unlucky in love until one day, she isn’t. Her cup suddenly runneth over with men and she must choose between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant (the answer is Colin Firth, dummies. C’mon.) It might be (very) loosely based on Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, but it’s also basically Twilight with pasty British men instead of vampires and werewolves.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
Nothing quite says “romance” like the encroaching the apocalypse. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World joins the hallowed fraternity of movies whose titles succinctly describe their plots. It is known worldwide that an asteroid will strike the Earth within three weeks. So most people respond with Bacchanalian glee, throwing sex and drug parties. Meanwhile Dodge (Steve Carell) just wants to go about his business… that is until he meets Penny (Keira Knightley).
To Catch a Thief
One of Alfred Hitchcock’s lighter efforts, the Master of Suspense decided to make a frothy and bemusing cat-and-mouse romance between thieves—and Hollywood has spent more than 60 years ripping him off ever since. Casting the debonair Cary Grant against the much younger Grace Kelly at her most alluring, cool blondeness, the picture quite literally has fireworks unite when they finally make love in a spacious penthouse overlooking the French Rivera.
That scene is iconic, but the rest of the movie is filled with wonderfully witty double entendres, meticulously designed heist scenes, and old school movie star charisma. For lovers of Classic Hollywood and Hitch’s masterful command of the camera, it’s hard to beat. It is also likely the movie that led Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to court Grant as their original pick for 007.
Atonement
At first glance, Atonement seems like standard people-talking-in-British-accents-during-WWII Oscar bait. Bu it is so much more than that. Atonement is as heartbreakingly tragic as it is earnestly romantic. It’s the story of how love can sometimes be derailed or destroyed by forces we absolutely wouldn’t expect. James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and the young Saoirse Ronan (who earned an Oscar nomination here) are all remarkable and Atonement, is a romance-war hybrid that works.
A Single Man
Come for the Oscar-worthy Colin Firth performance, stay for… everything else. A Single Man takes place over a single day in 1962 shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that sense of apocalyptic dread lingers over college professor George Falconer’s (Firth) very difficult, lonely day. George is still suffering from the death of his partner Jim (Matthew Goode) from several months earlier, and A Single Man charts George’s meticulous, touching journey toward finding love again… or something close to it. A Single Man is about love and life, and how they often are inseparable from each other.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
Wow, a lot of cheesy romantic comedies have the number “10” in them. It’s nice to pretend that 10 Things I Hate About You is a spiritual prequel to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. In the latter, however, it’s the adults who are behaving like assholes in the pursuit of romance. Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) works for a magazine and wants to write an article about, well, read the title again. There’s a big hitch in her plan, however, as the man she’s supposed to lose is Matthew Freaking McConaughey. Good luck with that, sister. McConaughey may or may not look back fondly at his history of romcoms but this one is unequivocally good and the best example of Hudson and McConaughey’s respective charms.
Drinking Buddies
This list has been all fine and good so far but I know what you’re thinking: WHERE ARE THE MILENNIAL CRAFT BREWERY ROMANTIC INDIE DRAMAS. Well here you go, hypothetical reader with incredibly specific tastes. Drinking Buddies is a mumblecore masterpiece starring some truly excellent and funny actors: Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, and Ron Livingston. It’s a mostly improvised, simple story about relationships, jealousy and lots of great craft beer. Kate (Wilde) and Luke (Johnson) are flirty coworkers at a craft brewery who decide to go on a joint trip with their significant others Chris (Livingston) and Jill (Kendrick). Romantic comedy ensues.
Midnight in Paris
Who knew that all it would take for Woody Allen to get out of his later-career rut would be to get the hell out of New York? Allen’s modest career renaissance began with 2005’s London-centric Match Point and continues with 2011’s Paris-tastic Midnight in Paris. It’s a cliche that Paris is a city of romance for a reason. Allen highlights that romance with a time traveling plot that features Owen Wilson’s Gil Pender, a screenwriter in a crumbling relationship, meeting up with literary icons like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to learn a thing or two about life, love, and literature.
Something’s Gotta Give
Something’s Gotta Give is a simple love story with a twist. Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) is a weathly music mogul accustomed to dating younger women. Erica Barry (Dianne Keaton) is the mother of Harry’s latest young conquest. The twist? They’re olddddddddddddddd! The horror!!!!!! Something’s Gotta Give is a sweet, funny movie featuring two excellent lead performances and just the right amount of “you’re so old” humor.
Chocolat
Sometimes it can be hard to find a pure romance film for the purposes of this list. There are romantic-dramas, romantic-comedies, romantic-everything. Thankfully, 2000’s Chocolat is one of the few pure romances. Though it certainly has its comedic and dramatic elements. Juliette Binoche stars as chocolatier Vianne who moves to a small, repressed French town and begins hocking her wonderful chocolates. The townspeople are distrustful of these sinful chocolates except for of course the mysterious Traveller Roux (Johnny Depp). Chocolat is a pure love letter to love…and chocolate.
Titanic
Titanic is the second highest grossing movie of all-time for a reason. A story set amid the Titanic sinking would have been interesting enough. But in a stroke of commerical and creative genius, director James Cameron decides to add in a pretty convincing and affecting love story between third-class Jack (Leonardo Dicaprio) and upper-class Rose (Kate Winslet). The movie works as both a love story and historical document.
Emma
Nothing says romance like a Jane Austen adaptation. And Gwyneth Paltrow, if you’re into a weird kind of love. Platrow stars as the titular Emma, an upper class lady who fancies herself a matchmaker. But of course matchmakers often have a hard time finding love themselves, don’t they? Enter Mr. Knightley (the incredibly British Jeremy Northam). Emma is a perfectly pleasant period adaptation and you will get exactly what your corny romantic heart needs from it. Also fun fact: the BBC did a TV adaptation of Austen’s novel the very same year the film came out (1996) starring Kate Beckinsale. So if you like the Paltrow version enough, compare and contrast with the Beckinsale version.
AWOL
AWOL is how indie romances should be – small, authentic, affecting. Joey (Lola Kirke) and Rayna (Breeda Wool) are two young women from a nowheresville Pennsylvania town. They meetcute at a local carnival and quickly fall for each other but circumstances threaten to crush their romance before it can even begin. AWOL understands first and foremost that while love is easy, relationships (and arguably everything else in the world is hard). Sometimes what you want and what your environment is able to allow you to have are two very different things.