What Are the Best Movies for Couples Who Have Recently Started Dating?

By the 3rd or 4th date, an evening out often turns into an evening on the sofa, and somebody has to pick the film. The choice has to hold 2 people’s attention and leave them something to talk about when the credits start. It also has to avoid long explicit scenes or graphic violence, which make a new couple self-conscious in front of each other. Length matters as well. A film close to 3 hours uses up the part of the evening that the couple actually wanted, which was time to talk.

The Princess Bride

Rob Reiner’s 1987 adaptation of William Goldman’s novel is framed as a story inside a story. A grandfather, played by Peter Falk, reads a book aloud to his sick grandson, played by Fred Savage, who listens with obvious reluctance at first. The book is a fairy tale with sword fights and a kidnapped princess, told with a steady run of jokes.

The film took $30.9 million in theaters on a $16 million budget and found most of its audience afterward on home video. The American Film Institute ranked it 88th among the 100 greatest film love stories. The romance is sincere, but the film laughs at itself often enough that neither viewer feels obliged to react to the love scenes, and at 98 minutes there is most of the evening left over.

Amélie

Subtitles are an advantage for a couple on a sofa, because a film that has to be read keeps both people off their phones for its whole length. Audrey Tautou plays a shy waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins in Montmartre who decides to improve the lives of the people around her while doing very little about her own isolation. The heroine finds it easier to organize strangers’ happiness than to approach a person she likes, and that hesitation is familiar to most people in the first weeks of seeing someone. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film took $33 million in the United States and Canada, a record for a French-language film in North America, and received 5 Academy Award nominations.

Before Sunrise

Jesse and Céline, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, meet on a train from Budapest and get off in Vienna to spend the night walking the city before his flight the next morning. Richard Linklater based the idea on a night he had spent walking around Philadelphia with a woman he had met by chance. The 1995 film was shot for $2.5 million in the summer of 1994, when temperatures in Vienna passed 100°F on most days of production.

The whole night is built from first date ideas that cost almost nothing. They drink wine in a park, a street poet by the Donaukanal writes them a poem, and they kiss at the top of the Riesenrad Ferris wheel at sunset.

No other film here is so close to an actual early date in structure. The story continues in 2 sequels, Before Sunset in 2004 and Before Midnight in 2013, each set 9 years after the one before.

The Big Sick

This is the film about the stage a new couple is at. Parents, cultural expectations and the question of when to introduce a partner to family all come up, and most of those scenes are played for laughs.

Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon wrote it about their own love story, and they describe it as about 60% true. Nanjiani plays himself as a struggling comedian in Chicago whose Pakistani parents keep presenting him with photographs of possible wives. He does not tell them about Emily. When she falls seriously ill and is placed in a medically induced coma, he spends the following days in the hospital with her parents, played by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. The film cost $5 million and took almost $56 million worldwide. It also earned the pair an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Crazy Rich Asians

Rachel Chu, a New York University economics professor, flies to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick for his best friend’s wedding and learns there that his family is extremely wealthy. Nick’s mother, played by Michelle Yeoh, disapproves of her. Most couples in the early months have not yet met each other’s families, and that meeting is the conflict at the center of the film, settled in the end over a game of mahjong between the 2 women. Directed by Jon M. Chu, it grossed about $239 million worldwide on a $30 million budget in 2018. It was also the first contemporary studio film with an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club in 1993.

Palm Springs

At 90 minutes, this is the shortest film here. Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti play Nyles and Sarah, 2 guests at a wedding in Palm Springs who become trapped in the same day, November 9, and wake up to repeat it. Inside the loop, Nyles and Sarah have nowhere else to be and no next day to plan for, so they learn about each other much faster than people normally would.

The film was shot in 21 days. At the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Hulu and Neon paid $17.5 million and 69 cents for it, which beat the previous Sundance sales record by 69 cents. A couple can finish it arguing about what each of them would do with an endlessly repeated day, and each person learns a fair amount about how the other one thinks from the answer.

Past Lives

Save this one for later. It is the slowest film here, and its subject is the people a person does not end up with, so a couple watching it will probably start comparing their own past relationships.

Nora and Hae Sung are childhood friends in Seoul who are separated when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada when she is 12. Celine Song’s 2023 debut follows them over 24 years. In the final part, Hae Sung visits New York, where Nora lives with her husband, Arthur, whom she met at a writers’ retreat in Montauk, and the 3 of them end up at the same bar on the same night. The film was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 96th Academy Awards. Former partners come up in most new relationships, and a quiet film is a mild way to raise the subject.

A Rule for the First Film Night

In a University of Rochester study of 174 newlywed couples, those who watched and discussed relationship movies with guided questions had a divorce or separation rate of 11% after 3 years, against 24% for couples who received no program at all. The participants were married, and the discussions ran to about 45 minutes a film. A couple a few weeks in does not need that much. When the credits start, put both phones face down and spend 10 minutes on what each person made of the characters before deciding what to do with the rest of the night.