Netflix has three very different, equally worthwhile romantic dramas and comedies streaming on its platform right now. Among the streamer’s best current titles is a 2017 gothic romance from “One Battle After Another” filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson that is rightly regarded as one of his greatest films. Additionally, Netflix has an early ’90s romantic classic starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks and a 2010s time-travel dramedy that knows how to make you laugh and cry in equal measure.
Here are the three best movies on Netflix you can watch this week.
“Phantom Thread” (2017)
2017’s “Phantom Thread” is, perhaps, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s greatest cinematic exploration of dysfunctional love. Set in 1950s London, this visually dazzling melodrama follows a couture dressmaker (Daniel Day-Lewis) who finds his many obsessive, controlling behaviors challenged after he strikes up a whirlwind romance with a young waitress (Vicky Krieps).
Featuring one of Day-Lewis’ greatest and most understated performances, “Phantom Thread” unspools as a Hitchcockian gothic romance where the art of surrendering yourself to another person is depicted as a vulnerable, ultimately brutal act of self-destruction. Anderson has never made a film quite like “Phantom Thread,” and its centerpiece New Year’s Eve sequence ranks high among the best scenes he has ever put together.
“Sleepless in Seattle” (1993)
“Sleepless in Seattle” is one of the coziest romances you will ever see. Directed by Nora Ephron, this riff on 1957’s “An Affair to Remember” (which was itself a remake of 1939’s “Love Affair”) follows a journalist (Meg Ryan) who finds herself drawn to a widowed architect (Tom Hanks) after hearing him talk about his late wife one night on a talk radio program. A sweeping romance full of the kind of earnest emotions that feel increasingly scarce in contemporary Hollywood, “Sleepless in Seattle” transforms Ryan and Hanks into vessels of pure, unambiguous yearning.
Of all of the film’s many magic tricks, perhaps none are more impressive than how beautifully Ephron seems to collapse the distance between her leads in “Sleepless in Seattle,” even while keeping them geographically apart. Then again, nothing has the power to erase distance quite like love.
“About Time” (2013)
Speaking of Hollywood romances that are unafraid of wearing their hearts on their sleeves, 2013’s “About Time” is an unwaveringly earnest, deeply moving film. Written and directed by “Notting Hill” screenwriter Richard Curtis, this fantasy romance follows a young man (Domhnall Gleeson) who discovers that the men in his family have the ability to travel into their pasts. He begins using that ability to build the love-filled life he’s always wanted.
He finds his other half in Rachel McAdams’ Mary, and “About Time” not only charts the beginnings of their romance but the highs and lows they face as they build a life together as well. The film is, without a doubt, one of the most tender movies you will find on Netflix right now — and also one of the most affecting.
