The 20 best rom coms of all time

Who needs a dating app when you have a great rom-com? From disastrous first dates and fake relationships to meet-cutes, meddling families and men in questionable knitwear, the genre has given us some of cinema’s most iconic love stories. These are the films we rewatch when we need a laugh, a swoon and a little reminder that happily-ever-after might actually exist. 

Whether you’re Team Darcy, falling for the wrong person or waiting patiently for your own airport-style grand gesture, these rom-com classics have it all: big chemistry, bigger chaos and just enough magic to keep us believing in love.

20. Love Actually (2003)

Eight—or depending on how you count them, approximately 800—romantic storylines collide across London in Richard Curtis’s aggressively festive ensemble rom-com. Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, and Andrew Lincoln are just some of the stars packed into the cast, and whether you find it genuinely romantic or deeply chaotic, Love Actually has become an essential part of the holiday-movie canon.

19. My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)

Julia Roberts gets to play the bad guy—or at least a woman making some spectacularly selfish romantic decisions—as Julianne, who realizes she loves her best friend only after he announces he's marrying someone else. The genius is that this isn't quite the Julia Roberts rom-com you expect: the movie refuses to hand its heroine the conventional ending, making it considerably more bittersweet than the glossy poster suggests.

18. Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

Bridget Jones’s Diary follows thirtysomething Bridget as she navigates singledom, career mishaps and the eternal dilemma of Daniel Cleaver versus Mark Darcy. Renée Zellweger’s performance earned her an Oscar nomination, while Colin Firth and Hugh Grant made the love triangle unforgettable—plus, yes, that infamous ugly Christmas jumper scene.

17. Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Constance Wu plays Rachel Chu, a New Yorker who travels to Singapore with her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), and discovers that his family is not just rich—they're obscenely rich. Beyond the gowns, mansions, weddings, and food, the film was a genuine Hollywood milestone, becoming the first major American studio movie in 25 years to feature a predominantly Asian cast.

16. While You Were Sleeping (1995)

While You Were Sleeping turns a lonely transit worker’s harmless crush into a wildly complicated family romance after a misunderstanding leaves her pretending to be engaged to a comatose man. Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman sparkle in this 1995 classic, which earned Bullock her first Golden Globe nomination and remains a masterclass in cozy Christmas rom-com chaos.

15. Notting Hill (1999)

What happens when the world’s biggest movie star walks into a tiny London bookshop? Hugh Grant's William Thacker finds out when Julia Roberts’s Anna Scott enters his life, and proceeds to turn it upside down. The film plays knowingly with Roberts's own celebrity status, while its Portobello Road setting, awkward charm, and famous blue-door romance have made it one of the most rewatchable British rom-coms.

14. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

Julia Stiles’s Kat Stratford is the prickly feminist heroine every teen movie needed, while Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona is the mysterious bad boy hired to win her over. Loosely based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the movie became a '90s classic and launched Ledger into the kind of heartthrob territory that would make his later career even more remarkable.

13. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Hugh Grant became the Hugh Grant we know and love with this charmingly awkward British classic, playing commitment-phobic Charles as he repeatedly crosses paths with Carrie (Andie MacDowell) at—you guessed it—four weddings and a funeral. Richard Curtis’s formula of gorgeous people, witty friends, terrible romantic timing, and devastatingly British emotional repression basically became the template for an entire generation of rom-coms.

12. Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence play two messy, complicated people who meet while both are trying to put their lives back together. What begins with a dance partnership turns into an unexpectedly tender romance, with Lawrence giving the performance that won her the Oscar for Best Actress. It's a rom-com for anyone who has ever thought love was supposed to be a little less tidy. 

11. The Big Sick (2017)

Kumail Nanjiani plays a fictionalized version of himself in this unusually honest rom-com about falling in love across cultural lines, and what happens when the person you love becomes seriously ill. The story was inspired by Nanjiani's real relationship with writer Emily V. Gordon, who co-wrote the screenplay, making its emotional stakes feel considerably more personal than your average meet-cute.

10. Moonstruck (1987)

Pop queen Cher plays Loretta, a widowed Brooklyn woman who agrees to marry one man and then promptly falls for his wildly passionate younger brother, played by Nicolas Cage. It's romantic, funny, deeply theatrical, and packed with an Italian American family whose opinions on everyone's love life are basically impossible to ignore. Cher won the Oscar for Best Actress, because yes, she really was that good.

9. When Harry Met Sally… (1989)

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan spend years debating whether men and women can really be friends before, inevitably, complicating their own answer. Nora Ephron's screenplay made the mundane stuff of relationships—the conversations, the anxieties, the tiny misunderstandings—feel worthy of a movie, while the Katz's Deli scene remains one of the most famous restaurant moments in cinema history.

8. The Princess Bride (1987)

True love, sword fights, pirates, poison, a giant, a revenge quest—and Cary Elwes saying, “As you wish.” The Princess Bride shouldn't work as neatly as it does, but its mix of romance, fantasy, comedy, and adventure has made it one of the most endlessly quotable movies ever made. 

7. Groundhog Day (1993)

Bill Murray is the deeply unpleasant TV weatherman Phil Connors, who wakes up to discover he’s living the same day over and over again—with Andie MacDowell’s Rita as his eventual romantic goal. It’s technically a time-loop comedy, but underneath all the jokes is a surprisingly sweet story about becoming someone worthy of love. Also, Groundhog Day has since become part of the English language as shorthand for anything that keeps happening again and again.

6. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

In Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant plays a buttoned-up paleontologist whose carefully ordered life is destroyed—in the best possible way—by Katharine Hepburn's gloriously chaotic heiress and her pet leopard, Baby. The movie was considered a commercial disappointment when it first came out, but its reputation grew over the decades until it became the ultimate example of screwball romance. 

5. Roman Holiday (1953)

Audrey Hepburn plays a princess who sneaks away from her royal duties for one perfect day in Rome, where she meets an American journalist played by Gregory Peck. Hepburn won her first Oscar for the role, and the movie turned Rome itself into a romantic fantasy—just try watching her ride a Vespa through the city without immediately wanting to book a flight over.

4. His Girl Friday (1940)

Reporter Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell, is trying to quit the newspaper business—and escape her ex-husband, editor Walter Burns, played by Cary Grant. The dialogue comes at you at approximately 100 miles per hour, and that was very much the point: director Howard Hawks pushed the actors to deliver their lines faster and faster, creating one of Hollywood's most gloriously chaotic screwball comedies.

3. The Apartment (1960)

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a lonely office worker whose apartment becomes a secret crash pad for his married bosses—until he falls for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator operator. Director Billy Wilder somehow turns infidelity, corporate ambition, and loneliness into a movie that’s both genuinely funny and quietly devastating, which is probably why it still feels much more modern than its 1960 release date suggests.

2. It Happened One Night (1934)

Before the road-trip rom-com became a genre unto itself, there was It Happened One Night: a runaway heiress, a broke reporter, and one very long journey from New York to her fiancé. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert’s bickering chemistry is the whole point, while the movie’s famous “Walls of Jericho” gag helped establish the idea that sometimes the best romance starts with two people who absolutely cannot stand each other.

1. The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Katharine Hepburn is Tracy Lord, a glamorous heiress whose wedding gets complicated when her ex-husband (Cary Grant) and a charming reporter (James Stewart) show up to cover the festivities. The movie is basically the blueprint for the sophisticated love triangle—and its offscreen story is just as good: it was written specifically as a comeback vehicle for Hepburn after Hollywood had dubbed her “box office poison.”