It has been a brutal winter in central Jersey and these romantic film options know that the coziness of on-screen sweaters is infectious and pleasantly insidious. The Citizen Kane of romantic comedies, When Harry Met Sally . . ., is as famous these days for Billy Crystal’s cavalcade of chunky knit sweaters as it is for the iconic Meg Ryan moaning in the diner scene. A viewing can also be transposed into a makeshift tribute for the late great Rob Reiner, which will make you look sensitive maybe. If you want another option that has been called “a hip When Harry Met Sally. . .” on a pull quote on its DVD box, 90s classic Love Jones also offers Larenz Tate in a delightful range of sweaters and coats that will have you turning up the heat literally and figuratively.

It is never not time for Twilight, the franchise that refuses to die and only grows stronger and more powerful with each passing year. The skin of a killer, the hola of a chica, the Loch Ness of a nickname: Twilight and its sequels truly have it all. Edward and Jacob might embody the iffy issues of age and rage, but we wouldn’t have our problematic kings from Forks any other way. Of course, if you are feeling a little kinkier and/or have great tolerance for plodding exposition and tedious nonsense, there is the Twilight fanfiction turned BDSM juggernaut Fifty Shades of Grey, in which a billionaire man builds a sex dungeon and dates women who look like his dead mother rather than go to therapy. Hotttt???

Speaking of problematic material, one of the big breakout publishing sensations of the past few years has been Colleen Hoover, the queen of BookTok and romanticizer of abusive and just plain weird behavior from dudes. If you want to wallow in a filmed adaptation, you can choose from It Ends with Us, whose tale of a controlling dude has spilled over into an IRL mess between stars Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively which is almost certainly more interesting than the movie itself, or Regretting You, a convoluted multi-tiered rom-dram where a literal car crash begats secrets that upend a family forever. If you are feeling nostalgic for the comparatively simple time of the early 2000s when Colleen Hoover had yet to ascend, you can look back upon the reign of Nicholas Sparks as King Romance Author Whose Books Become Movies with the immortal The Notebook, a film that I have never seen but have absorbed through osmosis due to its cultural ubiquity. I bet it’s good!

If you are a little horror freak, why not embrace the all-timer romance of diminutive killer doll Chucky and his goth baddie soulmate Tiffany Valentine (!) in the goated Bride of Chucky, a thoroughly deranged horror comedy that will change your life for the best. For more recent fare, the 2025 horror rom com Heart Eyes offers a parodic take of modern dating filtered through classic 80s slasher tropes. With both of these options, you can get a balanced mix of laughs and chills that will soften the heart of the most hardened hater.

Finally, as we slowly emerge from the snack induced coma of another Super Bowl, we have to ask ourselves can sports and love ever mix? And the answer is, of course, yes, if these films are to be believed. In recent years, Love & Basketball has gone from cult classic cable staple to being enshrined in both the Criterion Collection and the National Film Registry, with its tale of hooping neighbors who cannot quit each other continuing to resonate with audiences. For a more complicated approach to sports romance, we have Challengers, in which a multi-directional love triangle of tennis players reveals how the complicated conflagration of control, lust, friendship, and fuzzy yellow balls can lead to all kinds of wacky shenanigans.