Best Romance Movies to Watch on Hulu

One thing about director Sean Baker’s movies is that everything is rooted in class. Anora might charm as a romance, delight as a comedy, and dazzle as a realistic look into sex work, but at the end of the day, it’s a movie about labor, specifically exploitation labor, making the movie as painfully realistic as […]

The film opens with Julie in her early twenties, longing to pursue a career in medical school. But after briefly testing the waters, she switches over to psychology, only to drop completely out of school and transform her hobby of photography into a professional career. This indecisiveness carries over in most aspects of her life, […]

As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be […]

There are only two main characters in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande: Nancy, a retired teacher who was recently widowed, and Leo, an adept sex worker with a mysterious past. They’re almost always in one place and work on a single goal: pleasure. But despite the seeming monotony, the movie is crackling with wit […]

If it’s true that to cook is to love, then Dodin and Eugenie must be enraptured by one another. They use the exquisite language of food to express their feelings for one another, and watching their exchange, you can’t help but feel honored, if not embarrassed, to witness such an intimate and love-filled act. Food […]

A twitchy, uncomfortable noir film for the digital age, Decision to Leave blends the trappings of a restless police procedural with an obsessive forbidden romance. Here, director Park Chan-wook flips every interrogation and piece of evidence on its head, pulling us away from the whodunit and towards the inherently invasive nature of a criminal investigation. […]

She Taught Love has a familiar romance film plotline– a guy that’s lost meets a girl that sets him straight, and through a course of a connection, they challenge each other’s perspective to become better people– but there’s a naturalness to the conversations writer and male lead Darrell Britt-Gibson creates through his performance, casual, genuine […]

Rye Lane knows it’s treading familiar ground by having its charming leads fall in love as they walk and talk their way through a beautiful city. So instead of experimenting on a tried-and-tested setup, it smartly focuses on specificity. It hones in on the characters’ Gen Z woes and cranks up the British references, giving […]

Lovers share moments and memories intertwined with music, to the point that when the relationship ends, listening to an old track brings back the past. For Harriet in The Greatest Hits, this is literal, to the point that random music playing outside prolongs her grief. The story is familiar– it’s sort of similar to 2022’s […]

 As glad as I am to see a film celebrating the complex joys of interracial love and debunking the stigma of arranged marriages, I can’t help but wonder how and why a film about love got to be so dry and passionless. Is dating really this painfully awkward? Is marriage really this burdensome? Realistically, yes, […]

While gay acceptance has been improving in most of the world, unfortunately, this acceptance isn’t universal to all sexualities and queer gender identities, especially for people of color. Femme depicts this difference through the relationship of Jules, a black gay drag queen, and Preston, a white masculine closeted gay drug dealer. As Jules deepens their […]

Admittedly, it’s hard to watch the first twenty minutes of Dinner in America. The slurs are gratuitous, the suburban families are superficially satiric, and it seemed at first glance the leads were, too. But when the punk singer and his awkward fan meet, and they start driving around the Midwest, there’s a charming chemistry formed […]

Told in a playful mockumentary format, Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game delivers precisely what the title promises and a bit more. Apart from imparting interesting information about pinball’s complicated past (it was only declared legal in New York as recently as 1976), the film doubles as a touching family drama and a fun […]

With time-bending natural phenomena linking two teenagers into a romance, there’s no denying that The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes can feel a tad too similar to the internationally acclaimed Your Name (2016). Right off the bat, it doesn’t compare. Nonetheless, the film still works because of the key difference between them. Unlike […]

With a boring wedding, attended by a guarded woman and a spontaneous man, starting a series of shared recollections of past heartbreak, Which Brings Me to You has all the elements needed for an early aughts romcom, releasing at a time when Y2K is trending. The original novel’s epistolary format is interestingly translated into flashbacks […]

Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti (Modern Love, Black Mirror), and J.K. Simmons star in this easy but original rom-com that takes place in a wedding time loop. Nyles (Samberg) finds himself living the same day over and over again, so he gives in to the monotony and the fact that there is no way to escape […]

There’s no way to escape it– the plotline of One True Loves feels like the other side of Cast Away (2000), but instead of focusing on the survival aspect, it focuses on the wife trying to move on with grief. The original novel portrays Emma moving on through reclaiming her past, and learning to appreciate […]

This might just be the most insightful movie about men. Watch if you are a guy and you will cringe endlessly from seeing yourself in the characters, and if you are a girl  you should also watch it to laugh and understand the men around you better (yes, it is that insightful). Rob Gordon, a […]

In 2008, legendary and controversial director Darren Aronofsky delivered yet another unforgettable allegory, starring Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, an aging professional wrestler long past his prime, who is struggling to retain a sense of identity, purpose, and dignity later in life. Rourke, who worked as a professional boxer in his 90s and, […]

You know you’re in for a treat when you see Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini heading the cast of a sweet and slightly goofy comedy. Steadily going beyond his persona in The Sopranos, you see James Gandolfini playing a role that his fans have probably always imagined him playing: a nice, funny guy with an […]

Donnie Darko is a cult film by director Richard Kelly, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s about the troubled teenager Donnie who lives in a suburb and suddenly faces a person in a giant rabbit costume who tells him that the world is going to end in 28 days. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t […]

A beautifully intertwined love story showing the ups and downs of a father, his ex-wife, and their children experiencing love. The film weaves the three love stories of the different generations seamlessly and leaves you caring deeply about the characters. It has an amazing soundtrack added to fantastic acting that will make you feel as though you are living the same experiences as the […]

Once is about a vacuum cleaner/repairman/street musician and a florist in a boy-meets-girl-then-makes-music tale of love, friendship, family, and freaking great music. You can just feel the passion from this simple but charming low-budget movie capturing the chemistry of music making. The film’s music will make your skin tingle and hair stand on end. How good is […]

This anthology of 18 short films — directed by the likes of the Coen brothers, Gurinder Chadha, Wes Craven, and Olivier Assayas — is a cinematic charcuterie board. Each director offers their own creative interpretation of one north star: love in Paris. Romantic love is heavily represented, naturally, but in diverse forms: love that’s run […]

Written and directed by Bambi from Scrubs himself, Garden State is one hell of a directorial debut. It is one of those movies that leaves you wanting to cuddle, as it is very sweet, charming and funny… the whole lot really. It’s a movie you want to date. More than that, this is the film that popularized […]

The ’80s saw an influx of coming-of-age dramas, with John Hughes’ “Brat Pack” films reigning supreme. For better or worse, their most iconic scenes are embedded in pop culture, like students dancing in detention in The Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles’ belated birthday cake. Perhaps the most iconic ’80s movie moment comes not from Hughes, […]

We all love Jeff Bridges. We all agree that we shouldn’t leave a movie he won an Oscar for unwatched. That’s enough reason to watch this movie, but there are so many others. The story is fantastic and based on true events: a country musician living rough and having a shot at happiness after he […]

Watching Carol is like reading a really interesting book while relaxing on a Sunday afternoon. It is one of those movies that you probably heard about during its Oscar run, and have since delayed actually viewing it. Well now that it is on Netflix and other streaming services you have no excuse! It’s refreshingly unique, […]

Plenty of films have been made about the grueling climb to rock-and-roll fame, but few carry the effortless charm that That Thing You Do! has. Written and directed by Tom Hanks, the film is as cookie-cutter as it gets, dodging the dark depths that typically haunt rock biopics. But that isn’t to say That Thing […]

Jenna is a young woman living a rather unhappy life in a town in the American South. The highlight of her days is inventing and baking pies at the diner where she works, giving them names like the “I Hate My Husband Pie”. Her life, however, seems to have hit an unpleasant dead-end: as her […]

Dangerous Beauty is supposedly based on real-life Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco, and to its credit, the person existed, her educational background is true, and her being charged in front of the Inquisition for witchcraft after an epidemic has really been documented. It’s a perfect idea for a feminist feature promoting education for women, and highlighting […]

Far From the Madding Crowd is a classic tale, but in terms of story, it has the familiar thread of a lady having to choose between multiple swoon-worthy suitors, which is a common story of many lengthy, overly melodramatic period dramas. However, with the restrained direction of Thomas Vinterberg, and the writing of David Nicholls, […]

Best friends Miles and Jack are off to wine country to celebrate Jack’s last week of freedom before he gets married. They drop white lies about themselves, with Miles pretending to be a successful writer and Jack not mentioning his impending wedding, and soon meet two beautiful women whom they spend the rest of their […]