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Yes, it’s here. For weeks now, it’s been creeping into stores, windows, and advertisements, but now it’s reached peak saturation. Pink- and red-packaged everything! Roses all over the place! Seemingly the whole world dotted with little hearts! Valentine’s Day has arrived, and this time, it’s on a Friday — and that means the celebration will be taking over a whole weekend.
It’s a polarizing holiday. Some people love to embrace it unironically, while others make a point of rejecting it as a day of pro-coupledom propaganda. Every outlook is valid! But no matter how you feel about Valentine’s Day, the fact is, it’s happening (and it’s happening now), so you might as well stream something. So get a little taste of romance this weekend, however you prefer to take it: Choose between a collection of candy-sweet movies, a spicy reality series, or a romantic drama that goes down like a sour cocktail. By the end of the weekend, you’ll surely be feeling the love — or something like it.
An Italian getaway. Scott Foley stars in Mark Waters’ new rom-com La Dolce Villa as a businessman whose daughter (Maia Reficco) intends to blow her life savings on restoring a crumbling Tuscan villa. When he travels there to intervene, however, the romance of the place works its magic on him, too. Not a trip you want to make? Try going even further with a journey to The Witcher universe. Kang Hei Chul’s new animated fantasy The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep sees Geralt of Rivia (voiced by Doug Cockle) investigate a string of mysterious seaside attacks. Don’t want to dive into that one? Get ready to take on a grand finale: The epic conclusion to Cobra Kai is finally here, with Season 6, Part 3 marking the end of Daniel and Johnny’s decades-long story.
See how close you can get. For a bit of romance that’s never saccharine and always surprising, queue up Mike Nichols’ provocative drama Closer. Adapted from Patrick Marber’s play of the same name, the 2004 film stars Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, and Clive Owen as a quartet of gorgeous people who become entangled in a fraught love quadrangle. If your outlook on Valentine’s is tinged with cynicism, here’s a movie that excavates romance for the truth, only to find so many lies propping it up.
Leap without looking. The first six episodes of Love Is Blind Season 8 have now landed, and you can devote a day this weekend to watching its contestants try to find love in the pods. The romance reality series, created by Chris Coelen and co-hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, is structured around a social experiment wherein singles get to know each other while isolated, and only meet in person if they choose to become engaged. It may not sound too steamy — lacking physical contact and all that — but leaping into the unknown together emboldens the players and intensifies their blossoming connections.
Go ahead and fall in love. It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, after all, so you won’t get such a perfect opportunity to absolutely overwhelm yourself with romantic movies for another year. Start with some time-honored classics: Leo McCarey’s 1957 drama An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, is such an institution it inspired half the plot of Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle over 30 years later. And Meryl Streep and Robert Redford enact an unforgettable love story in Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985), which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.
In the spirit of those films that have endured for so long, why not follow them with a pair of movies in which love defies time itself? Lee Toland Krieger’s 2015 fantasy The Age of Adaline stars Blake Lively as a woman who doesn’t age for almost 80 years, until a new romance (Michiel Huisman) makes her want to change her lonely life; and Richard Curtis’ 2013 sci-fi dramedy About Time stars Domhnall Gleeson as a young man who discovers he can time-travel, which he tries to use to pursue a relationship with a woman he met by chance (Rachel McAdams).
It wouldn’t be Valentine’s without some romantic comedies, so call up some of the genre’s greats: Roger Michell’s Notting Hill, from 1999, stars Hugh Grant as a modest bookseller and Julia Roberts as the movie star who loves him. For another celebrity-normie romance, Chris Rock stars in 2014’s Top Five (also written and directed by Rock) as a famous comedian who feels a spark with a journalist (Rosario Dawson) writing a profile about him. Nahnatchka Khan’s 2019 entry Always Be My Maybe stars Ali Wong and Randall Park as childhood best friends who reconnect as adults and find that their mutual teenage crushes may still be lingering. And speaking of teenage crushes, Craig Johnson’s 2018 rom-com Alex Strangelove sees a high schooler (Daniel Doheny) dealing with feelings for two different people (Antonio Marziale and Madeline Weinstein).
Finally, there are the rom-coms that remind us that some of the greatest loves in life really are the friends we make along the way. Donald Petrie’s Miss Congeniality (2000) stars Sandra Bullock as an FBI agent who goes undercover at a beauty pageant, while Christian Ditter’s How to Be Single (2016) follows four women (Dakota Johnson, Rebel Wilson, Leslie Mann, and Alison Brie) all navigating the single life in their own different ways.
… to turn the page. Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, and Mary Steenburgen star in Bill Holderman’s charming 2018 rom-com Book Club as four best friends whose outlooks on life and love begin to change when they read a certain steamy bestseller for their book club. Catch it in the next week, before this chapter ends.