The 15 Best Romantic Movies To Watch On Valentine's Day

This Valentine’s Day, there aren’t many better ways to make the most of quality time with your loved one than by huddling up together under a blanket — or over a conference call, should you happen not to be physically together — and watching a nice, soothing, replenishing romantic film.

In fact, a good romantic movie may be a great way to spend Valentine’s Day even if you’re spending it single and/or all by yourself. If you doubt that, just take a gander at any of these 15 movies, which present visions of love and romance so gorgeous and seductive as to win over even the most skeptical hearts, and restore the faith in love of even the most dyed-in-the-wool cynics. From delightful romcoms to profoundly cathartic dramas to bold formal experiments, here are the best romantic movies to watch this February 14.

When it comes to romantic comedies, it’s safe to say that no one has ever done it quite like Nora Ephron — and this applies as much to those genre-defining Nora Ephron screenplays as to her forays into direction, the most gorgeous and essential of which might be “Sleepless in Seattle.”

Despite being a veritable totem of the romcom genre, “Sleepless in Seattle” is actually, when you really break it down, one of the boldest Hollywood romantic comedies ever made. Rather than follow the early development of a relationship, it charts love’s push-pull as an elemental, almost physical force. Sam (Tom Hanks) and Annie (Meg Ryan) don’t actually meet until very, very late into the movie — but the wistful, hopelessly romantic, endlessly crowd-pleasing mechanics by which Ephron nudges them slowly toward each other are an unfettered joy to watch, all the way down to one of the most swoon-worthy endings of all time. Plus, y’know, it’s Hanks and Ryan, the Lennon-McCartney of romcom leads, and there’s just no going wrong with those two.

Released in 1953, “Roman Holiday” epitomized the romantic comedy genre by bridging its buoyant, glamorous Old Hollywood form and its nascent cosmopolitan future. Starring Audrey Hepburn in her most solar and mesmerizing comedic performance, it’s a movie that will make you fall in love with a lot of things at once: its two leads, William Wyler’s patient classicist style, Dalton Trumbo’s expert dramatic structuring, the very idea of love … and, of course, the city of Rome, to which “Roman Holiday” takes you on an imaginary trip.

The plot follows Ann (Hepburn), the crown princess of an unnamed European country, who, while on a draining tour of Europe’s capitals, decides on a whim to ditch her schedule and explore Rome by herself. She’s ultimately rescued from a medication-induced stupor by American reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), who doesn’t recognize her at first, but eventually sees in her escapade the scoop of a lifetime. Their ensuing whimsical adventure through the Eternal City — shot largely on location — is one of the most purely sweet and enchanting distillations of the process of falling in love ever committed to film.

Before Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger started pushing Technicolor to new heights, they honed their craft in the mid-to-early 1940s with a series of equally accomplished black-and-white features — the most incredible of which is the 1945 romantic drama-slash-Scottish paean “I Know Where I’m Going!”

Despite its title, “I Know Where I’m Going!” tells the story of a woman who isn’t quite sure about where to head. Determined to marry wealthy industrialist bachelor Sir Robert Bellinger even though she hasn’t yet met him, Mancunian Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) heads to the Scottish island of Kiloran to meet her husband-to-be but ends up stranded in the nearby Isle of Mull while awaiting navigable weather. Soon, she finds herself absorbed into the vibrant local community, and increasingly smitten with the impossibly gallant Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey) — which leads her to question what she really wants out of life. 

The blueprint for every “falling in love with a place” romcom, “I Know Where I’m Going!” charts Joan’s existential conflict as exuberantly as any subsequent Powell-Pressburger film, using the elements, the humid landscape of the Hebrides, and the majesty of the Gulf of Corryvreckan to fully convey passion’s charge upon the soul.

Donna Deitch’s “Desert Hearts” is one of the most influential LGBTQ+ movies ever made. Among the lesbian movie canon, in particular, it was just an utterly unquantifiable breakthrough for 1985 — the first American film with a real budget to tell a positive, uplifting, non-sensationalized, non-objectifying love story between two women. To this day, it remains one of the most ecstatically inspiring and beautiful romance films ever, courtesy not only of its glass-ceiling-shattering boldness but of Deitch’s immense talent, as showcased in her first stab at fiction film.

Set in 1959, the movie mostly takes place at a ranch in Reno, Nevada, populated by women waiting out the formalities of quickie divorces. While passing time at the ranch, Columbia English professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) takes a shine to Cay Rivers (Patricia Charbonneau), the free-spirited adoptive daughter of ranch owner Frances Parker (Audra Lindley). Unfazed by Vivian’s sheer repression, Cay encourages her to break free from her fears and embrace her true self — and they live out a joyful, sexy, inebriating romance that Deitch captures with the zesty determination of an outsider genius rewriting the Hollywood rulebook in real-time.

Come to think of it, “Before Sunrise” is, above all, a stupendous feat of conceptualization: Two otherwise-committed people cross paths far away from home, and spend the night talking out, around, and about their irresistible attraction to each other, luxuriating in its very development, nurturing and exploring it with every word. As wish-fulfillment romance goes, it doesn’t get better or more magical than this; it’s a movie that makes material, believable, tactile, the age-old idea of meeting your soulmate out and about on a day like any other.

As if primed from the start to claim its place as the quintessential chance-meeting romance, “Before Sunrise” starts on a train. Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, is traveling to Vienna to catch a flight back to the U.S.; Céline (Julie Delpy), a Frenchwoman, is returning home to Paris. They start talking, hit it off, and Jesse proposes to Céline that she get off in Vienna and spend the day with him. Thus begins one of the most extraordinary love stories in film history, as Richard Linklater and co-writer Kim Krizan — aided by Delpy and Hawke’s miraculous, human-yet-ethereal performances — pay close attention to every detail of Céline and Jesse’s deep, involved, increasingly tender, increasingly passionate conversations, watching them fall head over heels for each other in real-time.

In addition to her masterful works as a director, Nora Ephron was also responsible, as a screenwriter, for setting the storytelling template that virtually all contemporary romcoms — including her own — would subsequently follow. The film in which she pulled that off, 1989’s Rob Reiner-directed “When Harry Met Sally…,” is exhilarating in multiple ways. It’s a meta-cinematic feat of invention — it’s like watching a whole host of movies be born before your eyes — and as a work of precise crowd-pleasing craft (augmented by Billy Crystal’s spontaneity).

The distinction that makes “When Harry Met Sally…” a particularly modern take on the genre is that it explicitly inquires about the difference between love, sex, and friendship. Harry (Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) have an established, profound relationship long before they’ve so much as gestured towards actually getting together, and the movie then builds upon that rich, sturdy foundation with serious questions about what it means to be in love with someone as an adult — without skimping on the hilarity. It’s the rare film that gets to catharsis and enchantment by way of depth and intelligence.

Leos Carax is the kind of filmmaker whose passion for cinema and its possibilities as an inexhaustible plaything is so immense that it can sometimes result in arid, controversial, utterly uncommercial work. But even those not particularly drawn to Carax’s more outré formal and conceptual experiments will have a hard time resisting the charms of “The Lovers on the Bridge,” a film in which the French maverick auteur puts all his talent and energy in service of depicting pure, unbridled, overwhelming love.

As enamored with the city of Paris as they come, the film tells of the blossoming relationship between two homeless vagrants, alcoholic street artist Alex (Denis Lavant) and painter-going-blind Michèle (Juliette Binoche), both of whom live near the Pont Neuf bridge over the Seine. Despite the constant hardship of their lives, they become so completely obsessed with each other that the entire city — nay, the entire world — seems to fall away as they spend time together, and Carax stages blockbuster moments of maximalist romanticism that make almost every romance movie seem unambitious by comparison. The ’90s were a great decade for bold, vigorous cinema all around, but “The Lovers on the Bridge” is something else entirely.

“Weekend” is one of the quintessential 21st-century films about that most quintessential 21st-century institution — the one-night stand that gradually turns into something bigger, deeper, and more tender, without quite resolving into a full-blown Thing. Tom Cullen and Chris New star as Russell and Glen, two men who meet at a club in Nottingham, England, go over to Russell’s apartment, and end up spending — you guessed it — a weekend together. Through a series of open-hearted conversations, tender gestures, and brilliantly filmed sex scenes, they come to access much more of each other’s souls and form a much greater connection than they ever expected.

The movie that launched writer-director Andrew Haigh into the royal gallery of contemporary queer cinema, “Weekend” is a masterpiece of searching, dauntless complexity. It’s an unapologetically gay romance film, steeped in finely-observed details of British queer life in 2011 and the particular trials and hardships of seeking romance and sex in a world that loathes your romantic and sexual preferences, yet it is also universal in its import. It’s sad, but also life-affirming; hot and sensual, but deeply gentle; blunt and raw and candid, but with plenty of room for elation and escapism. There aren’t many better films about how it feels, in our day and age, to be stopped in your tracks by someone new.

Cross-cultural romance films haven’t exactly been a novelty for a century or so now, but vanishingly rare are the films about interracial romance where both parties are people of color — let alone ones that speak to themes of ethnic and sociocultural identity and how it interfaces with love and connection as dutifully and brilliantly as Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala.”

This 1991 masterwork tells the story of Mina (Sarita Choudhury), an Ugandan Indian woman expelled from her home country as a child by Idi Amin’s regime. Mina grows up in Greenwood, Mississippi, and eventually strikes up a romance with Demetrius (Denzel Washington), whose community is skeptical and judgmental of Mina just as hers — especially her father (Roshan Seth) — is of him. Against that unapologetically political backdrop, Nair and writer Sooni Taraporevala weave an enormously mature and intelligent story about two smart adults in love endeavoring to make it work no matter what — one that conjures up immense romanticism and passion (largely thanks to Choudhury and Washington’s off-the-charts chemistry) while still taking the time to understand and honor the human complexities underlying its framework of cultural conflict. It’s flawless romance for grown-ups.

There’s something almost unspeakably tender about the way Payal Kapadia locates and represents the feeling of love in “All We Imagine as Light.” The film, which took home India’s first-ever Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, is a city symphony of sorts, floating nimbly through Mumbai streets alongside its two Malayali nurse protagonists and taking stock of everything beautiful and tough and tragic and vibrant about the seventh-biggest metropolis in the world. But its emotional center is the subject of romance — as expressed both through Prabha’s (Kani Kusruti) longing for her estranged husband and through Anu’s (Divya Prabha) blooming relationship with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon).

In handling both women’s stories, Kapadia gives their loves a kind of spiritual charge that had scarcely been seen in cinema since Wong Kar-Wai’s ’90s apogee, “Chungking Express.” Prabha’s story is thorny and melancholy, but the story of Anu and Shiaz, sweetly in love and steadfastly committed to being together despite the social stigma of inter-religious dating, is as heartwarming and enchanting as anything you’ll find in movies. The way both stories slowly braid together thematically is nothing short of genius.

If there’s something inherently becoming of cinematic romance to the city of New York, then “An Autumn’s Tale” deserves a place in the romantic movie canon just for the sheer, unparalleled gusto and originality with which it maps out the Big Apple and its human nodes. But even if it were set somewhere else entirely (with all the accompanying tweaks to its incorrigibly New York story), the movie would still be a high watermark of the genre on the strength of Mabel Cheung’s directorial virtuosity. Of all her fellow countrymen who eventually crossed over to the West, she may have been the one to most adroitly port the free, ecstatic spirit of the Hong Kong New Wave to American soil.

Certainly, no other U.S.-set movie of the ’80s moves and looks and acts quite like this one, which tracks the unspooling of feeling between NYC newcomer Jennifer Lee (Cherie Chung) and Samuel Pang (Chow Yun-fat) so patiently and poetically. The film shows so much relaxed attention to the textures of the New York immigrant experience that you almost don’t notice how hard Cheung is working to make every shot and cut and actorly gesture perfect. The film is an unfussy masterpiece of worldly urban tenderness, a Hong Kong classic for a reason, and unmissable romantic viewing.

If we’re being completely honest, the love stories in a large number of Disney animated films feel like box-ticking more than anything. For all the infamous centrality that romantic subplots tend to take in the Disney oeuvre, not a lot of Disney movies actually bother to thoroughly develop both parties of a couple and position them against each other in such a way as to produce engrossing friction the way a good romance does.

On the other hand, “Beauty and the Beast” did such a phenomenal, definitive job of it that it pretty much single-handedly makes up for every less-than-romantic Disney romance. Belle (Paige O’Hara) and the Beast (Robby Benson) aren’t just two uncharacteristically well-written and believable characters with a genuinely compelling relationship dynamic; theirs is nothing short of an elemental romance, love distilled to a primeval audiovisual form, and instilled with honest-to-goodness magic by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s absurdly beautiful songs.

Two full decades later, it has only become more stunning to contemplate what an achievement “Saving Face” was. In 2025, we still don’t get very many Hollywood romance films about lesbians of color, period — nevermind ones that teem with such wit, passion, and authenticity as Alice Wu’s debut.

“Saving Face” is an outlier in American cinema of the 2000s — both in terms of its thematic focus and in the way it seems preternatural, almost miraculously uninterested in doing things the way other movies would. The film follows two parallel stories that radiate from New York surgeon Wilhelmina “Wil” Pang (Michelle Krusiec): the story of her courtship with Vivian (Lynn Chen), and the story of her fraught relationship with her mother Hwei-Lan (Joan Chen). Both stories — and the quietly ambitious studies of character and society they add up to — are by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and warm, yet never less than deeply engaging. And through Wu’s utterly unique eye, Wil and Vivian’s budding relationship avoids every expectable pitfall of early-2000s queer romcoms you could name.

An all-around banquet of fine-baked Hollywood romantic glamour, “Love & Basketball” is also, by virtue of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s commitment to the full extent of her characters’ journeys and subjectivities, one of the most honest, believable, and convincing of all romance films — not to mention one of the best basketball movies ever.

Following childhood friends Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) and Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) through four “quarters” set in different moments of their lives as they grow up together, fall in love, and then find that love tested by the demands of their bustling basketball careers, “Love & Basketball” could be called a precursor to “Challengers” in the way it charts love as it pinballs around through time, coming up against the encroaching intricacies and complications of professional ambition.

But really, Prince-Bythewood’s sensibility as writer-director is so sui generis that to compare it to anything else would be a disservice. In her first film, she makes the cozy and familiar feel grand and rapturous and vice-versa — all while telling a love story so wise, complex, and well-constructed that it almost seems too good to be Hollywood.

“Chungking Express” comprises two stories, both of them possessed of romanticism so intense and operatic as to render all resistance futile. Even if you’ve all but given up on love, this is the kind of movie that’s all but guaranteed to make you believe in it again, even just a little bit.

Arguably the purest expression of Wong Kar-Wai’s career-long endeavor to reshape cinema from scratch in the image of ecstasy and yearning, “Chungking Express” sets Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and Faye Wong running free in the Hong Kong night, with only street eats, neon lights, pop songs, pineapple cans, and Wong’s effervescent genius structuring their erratic searches for connection. The result is a film that taps into something primal — a zest for the world and all the love it holds that you might not have even noticed in yourself before watching.