What is it about spring that just screams romance? Valentine’s Day is over, but the skies are blue, the flowers are blooming, and love is in the air. We’re living in Peak Rom Com season: the ideal time for a meet-cute in the park, and the perfect season to buy flowers for your sweetie.
Whether you love to be swept away in a dazzling romance or you like to chuckle at embarrassing pratfalls, romantic comedies are the perfect cross-section of movie genres. These movies simultaneously pull at your heartstrings and poke at your funny bone, and the best part is, you can always expect a happy ending—perfect when you want to zone out from your own dating disasters.
If you’ve got an account (or your cousin’s boyfriend’s sister’s login), then you’ve got access to our favorite romantic comedies currently streaming on Netflix. Queue them up for a night in, whether you’re flying solo or bringing home that hottie you met in the park.
The Artist
2012’s Best Picture winner is a black and white love letter to the magic of silent cinema, centered on a matinee icon who falls for an ingenue as their fortunes in Hollywood rise and fall with the advent of the talkies. The Artist has everything: a winning love story, a thoughtful meditation on art, and a really funny dog. What more could you want?
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Safety Not Guaranteed
Aubrey Plaza brings her trademark deadpan wit to this quirky sci-fi romcom, in which she stars as a disillusioned magazine intern who teams up with her colleagues to find the writer of a classified ad seeking a time travel companion. When she finds the writer (Mark Duplass), they form an unexpected bond, making for a sweet story about disillusioned young people reckoning with their long-deferred dreams.
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Tortilla Soup
In this Mexican-American remake of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, Hector Elizondo stars as a widowed chef who has lost his senses of taste and smell. Living at home with his three grown daughters, he feels that his days have lost their succor—until a beguiling widow walks into his life. Featuring sumptuous meals and a succession of heady romances, this story of family, food, and second chances hits all the right notes.
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Mr. Right
In this deliciously over the top film, the romcom genre gets twisted up with action movie tropes. Anna Kendrick stars as Martha McKay, a woman characteristically unlucky in love, who soon discovers that her new beau (Sam Rockwell) is a hitman gone rogue. Screwball and silly, marrying cotton candy romance with violent killings, Mr. Right lands on our list thanks to the electric chemistry between its two leads.
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To All the Boys: Always and Forever
The third and final film in Netflix’s mega-popular To All the Boys franchise sees Lara Jean and her boyfriend, dreamboat Peter Kavinsky, at a crossroads. Newly returned from a life-changing trip to Korea and staring down her senior year, Lara Jean considers her college plans, with and without her beau. Fans of the series will be deeply satisfied by this winning, winsome conclusion.
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The Prince and Me
In this cult classic from the early aughts, Julia Stiles stars as a pre-med student at the University of Wisconsin who falls for a classmate who secretly happens to be the Crown Prince of Denmark, posing as a normal college student. The film spawned three sequels, but the OG remains the best: a fluffy fantasy of royalty and romance, all grounded in one woman’s determination to follow her professional dreams.
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The Lovebirds
On the brink of a breakup, Leilani and Jibran unintentionally become involved in a bizarre murder. The two spend a wild night attempting to clear their names and find the killer, maybe even salvaging their relationship.
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Silver Linings Playbook
After losing his job and his wife, as well as a stint in a mental institution, Pat (Bradley Cooper) moves back in with his parents. He wants to win back his wife and get his life back, until he meets an intriguing but complicated woman, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who won an Oscar for her performance.
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Can’t Hardly Wait
Recent high school grads spend a night at a wild party where they each have a different agenda for the evening, including winning over the prom queen, revenge on a bully, and losing their virginities.
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I’ll See You in My Dreams
People over 50 deserve rom-coms, too, and this is Blythe Danner’s. Widow Carol Peterson (Danner) lives alone with her dog in California. Eventually, she meets Bill (Sam Elliott) who changes her mind about falling in love again. She also meets Lloyd (Martin Starr), and then the rest of the movie we are just thinking about Martin Starr as Bill in Freaks and Geeks (1999).
About Time
At age 21, Tim Lake learns from his father (Bill Nighy) that the men in his family—including him—can travel through time. But when he falls for a woman named Mary (Rachel McAdams), Tim begins to see that there are some specific complications to his time-traveling abilities.
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Someone Great
After Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) is dumped by her long-term boyfriend and lands a music writing job at Rolling Stone in San Francisco, she embarks on a mission with her best friends, Erin (DeWanda Wise) and Blair (Brittany Snow) to have one more adventure in New York City.
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Always Be My Maybe
In Ali Wong’s directorial debut film, she plays Sasha Tran, who returns home to San Francisco to open a new restaurant and runs into her childhood best friend, Marcus Kim. They fall back into their friendship, and the possibility of a romance lingers again.
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The Incredible Jessica James
2 Dope Queens’ Jessica Williams proves her leading lady status as a struggling New York playwright who, following a breakup, bounces back by dating a recently single older guy (played by Chris Dowd).
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The Kissing Booth
Elle Evans (Joey King) might not be the most popular girl in school, but her social status definitely rises when she volunteers to run the kissing booth at the school carnival—a scheme to lock lips with her crush, who just happens to be her best friend’s brother.
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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
This irreverent and energetic movie stars Michael Cera as a slacker musician who hits the romantic jackpot when he meets his new girlfriend Ramona Flowers—but must defeat her seven evil exes in manic, video game-inspired fashion.
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Set It Up
Two corporate assistants (Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell) are tired of their domineering bosses (Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs), so they scheme to hook them up in order to lighten their workload (and, naturally, also happen to fall for each other, too).
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She’s Gotta Have It
Spike Lee’s first feature film is an indie black-and-white comedy starring Tracy Camilla Johns as a young woman in Brooklyn who juggles three potential boyfriends.
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Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
Stranger Things‘ Barb finally gets her redemption, with Shannon Purser starring in Netflix’s latest original teen comedy as the titular outcast who teams up with the most popular girl in school in order to nab their respective crushes.
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To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Lara Jean Song Covey (Lana Condor) is your typical lovelorn teenage girl, drafting love letters to her former crushes for her eyes only. But when the letters wind up being mailed to the former objects of her affection, her life is turned upside-down as the boys confront her about her former feelings.
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Adrienne Westenfeld
Assistant Editor
Adrienne Westenfeld is a writer and editor at Esquire, where she covers books and culture.
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