The 14 Best Valentine’s Day Movies Streaming on Hulu in 2024

Did you know that as of this Valentine’s Day, Hulu only has a small handful of movies made before 1990 available to stream on their platform? (One of them is the decidedly non-romantic Paul Newman pool-hall drama The Hustler.) So if you’re on the lookout for some of the most classic romances in cinematic history — like, say, It Happened One Night or The Philadelphia Story — you’re going to want to look elsewhere. That said, but Hulu’s selection of love-adjacent movies open up an interesting opportunity to go beyond the love-story canon, and seek out a variety of contemporary movies, all of which help prove that on-screen romance isn’t dead. So rather than rewatching When Harry Met Sally… for the umpteenth time, why not use your Hulu subscription to check out one of these fourteen gems, secret classics, obscurities, and cable mainstays?

1. Sleeping with Other People

   Speaking of sleeping: This is one of the most slept-on romantic comedies of recent years, a bona fide classic that hardly anyone saw, especially in its original 2015 theatrical release. Since then, it’s been bouncing around a few different streaming services, hopefully building its audience in the meantime. A post-SNL, pre-Ted Lasso Jason Sudeikis and Community’s Alison Brie play college acquaintances who hook up freshman year and reunite as friends a decade-plus later, as both attempt to abstain from sex for different reasons. It’s kind of a bawdy version of When Harry Met Sally, but without ever feeling like a ripoff. Writer-director Leslye Headland has made an unapologetically sexy and adult-oriented rom-com that nonetheless pulses with genuine, swoonworthy yearning, with career-best performances from both of her charming leads.

2. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet

   If you want to have a good Valentine’s Day cry (preceded by a stylish series of Valentine’s Day shoot-outs), it’s hard to beat Baz Luhrmann’s alternate-universe modernization of the Shakespeare classic, starring Claire Danes and a young Leonardo DiCaprio. Elizabethan costumes and settings are out, in favor of wild printed shirts, angel wings, and shiny guns, but Elizabeth language remains intact in one of the boldest Shakespeare adaptations of the ’90s boom – or any time, really.

3. Palm Springs

   Everyone knows that Groundhog Day is the greatest time-loop comedy of all time. But the one area where it admittedly falls a little flat is its romantic chemistry, something Palm Springs has in abundance. Andy Samberg and Cristin Miloti are perfectly matched as two dissatisfied thirtysomethings trapped together in a seemingly infinite loop, and within this sci-fi story the movie finds room for big, broad laughs alongside a well-written romantic relationship between adults who feel like screw-ups.

4. Drinking Buddies

   At first glance, this comedy is about two brewery employees and heavy drinkers (Jake Johnson and Olivia Wilde) whose closeness (and probably also drinking) threatens to alienate their respective romantic partners (Anne Kendrick and Ron Livingston) – and it is that, on one level. But director Joe Swanberg’s loose, improvisational, indie-trained style gives his actors a lot of leeway towards generating the kind of sublimated yearning that makes Drinking Buddies genuinely and unexpectedly romantic. It’s also the rare will-they-or-won’t-they that’s able to create some genuine mystery over whether its two leads can, will, or should get together.

6. Garden State

   Admittedly, Zach Braff’s emo dramedy about grief, numbness, and New Jersey falls short as the generational statement that was described two decades ago when the movie became the indie sensation of 2004 and the soundtrack went into permanent rotation as your hairdresser. But look, if you can reframe it in your head as an offbeat, melancholic romantic comedy about an overmedicated depressive (Braff) meeting cute with a charming young woman (Natalie Portman, doing the absolute most to make a fantasy girl feel like a living person), it starts to look like an overachiever – stylish, funny, locationally specific – rather than a movie that’s not nearly as good as The Graduate. In other words, romance wins!

7. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

   Céline Sciamma’s romantic drama, set in late 18th century France, is almost impossibly intimate and frequently electric, with a central relationship that reverberates well beyond its relatively short timeline. An artist (Noémie Merlant) comes to a remote estate to paint a portrait of a young woman (Adèle Haenel), who is about to be married off to a stranger; the two women connect, and begin a brief, passionate affair. One of recent cinema’s most memorable queer romances quickly became canonized and popped onto the most recent Sight & Sound Top 100.

8. Plus One

   Maya Erskine is currently earning great reviews for her TV-series take on Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but she had quieter practice at romance with this more traditional, wedding-centric rom-com. Erskine and fellow Prime Video star Jack Quaid (The Boys) play friends who agree to be each other’s permanent dates to a series of friend-group weddings, in hopes of serving as each other’s wing-person. Even if you can guess what eventually happens, Plus One is so funny and charming that it doesn’t much matter. It also turns a keenly sociological (but still comic) eye on wedding culture, something other rom-coms tend to treat superficially, even when they’re making fun of them.

9. Rye Lane

   A South London-set single-day rom-com with shades of Before Sunrise and blasts of stylish color, Rye Lane follows a pair of strangers (David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah) who meet following their respective break-ups and wind up spending the day together. If some of its individual scenes and dialogue exchanges might feel a little familiar, it adds up to something more vibrant and distinct, with charismatic performances from its two leads.

10. Warm Bodies

    Who says Valentine’s Day can’t echo spooky season? This rom-zom-com features a zombie (Nicholas Hoult) whose inarticulate craving for human flesh is offset by his newfound crush on a human woman (Teresa Palmer). It’s not a direct spoof of Twilight – it has its own young-adult novel source material – but Warm Bodies does riff on the undead boyfriend concept with surprising sweetness.

11. The Boy Downstairs

    Anyone in the mood for a relatively light movie about romance but wary of the clichés and contrivances that often accompany romantic comedies might do well to check out this barely-seen indie, in which Zosia Mamet from Girls plays an aspiring writer who winds up moving upstairs from her One That Got Away. There’s a refreshing realness to the rhythms of the characters’ lives: near misses, time jumps, on-and-off infatuations. At the same time, none of it is gritty enough to undermine the movie’s potential as a charmingly low-key Valentine’s Day watch.

12. 10 Things I Hate About You

    A simultaneous entry in the late-’90s Shakespeare adaptation boom and the overlapping turn-of-the-century teen-movie boom, 10 Things I Hate About You is slickly cute, a little glib, sometimes crass, and often difficult to resist thanks to the work of Julia Stiles and the late, great Heath Ledger. She’s the super-feminist older sister to a much-desired popular girl who can’t date until her sibling does, which is why some doofy boys hire Ledger’s badass to woo Stiles – only they fall for each other for real, in this loose retelling of The Taming of the Shrew (which, to be fair, had the distinct disadvantage of not featuring Letters to Cleo).

13. What’s Your Number?

    What’s Your Number? is about a messy woman panicking that she’s slept with too many guys and must therefore go back through her personal history to find a permanent mate she’s already met. So, yes, it’s one of those premises so ham-handedly problematic that watching the heroine belatedly understand its stupidity isn’t much fun (especially when the movie wants to both rebel against these silly expectations and still vaguely imply that she has slept with too many guys). So why bother with it on Valentine’s Day? Because sometimes a dopey comfort watch does the trick, and no one knows how to spark up and elevate a comfort watch like Anna Faris, one of the best comic actresses in the biz. She gets an assist here from a charming Chris Evans, playing against Captain America type as a womanizing cad. Plus, the movie perfectly casts the wonderful Ari Graynor as Faris’s sister.

14. The Hating Game

    Lucy Hale has maintained an appreciation for the old-fashioned star vehicle; even if her movies don’t play on thousands of movie screens, they become mainstays on streaming services as ultra-watchable retreads of familiar genres. Here, Hale takes on the enemies-to-lovers trope, as her publishing-industry rivalry with a coworker (Austin Stowell) gunning for her promotion morphs into passionate smooching. It’s formulaic stuff, with a rom-com’s typically dopey rewrite of how the publishing industry even works, but Hale and Stowell are fun to watch and hit all the expected beats with energy.

15. Wild Mountain Thyme

    Finally, maybe you want to watch something romantic for Valentine’s Day, but you’re also a self-identified weirdo who finds themselves frequently annoyed by the ritualistic side of so many romantic movies. Wild Mountain Thyme may have the weirdness you’re looking for; writer-director John Patrick Shanley wrote Moonstruck and Joe vs. the Volcano, both of which look positively straitlaced next to this adaptation of his own play. Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt play lifelong family friends who seem constantly on the verge of admitting their romantic feelings to one another, and reach a bizarre crossroad in their relationship. If you can roll with the writerly strangeness, you’ll be treated to heartfelt performances from Blunt and Dornan (who, frankly, is better at playing more overt weirdos than Christian Grey) and also Christopher Walken playing an Irishman. What better transition into St. Patrick’s Day?

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.