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Romantic Comedy · Ranked

Best Romantic Comedies, Ranked by IQ Score

The romantic comedies that take their material as seriously as romance and as carefully as comedy. Ranked by IQ Score.

Romantic comedy is the most-maligned major film genre, frequently dismissed as commercial fluff. The works on this list are different, they take romantic relationship cognition as actual subject and treat their comedy as structural craft rather than as joke filler.

Anchor picks: When Harry Met Sally (Ephron/Reiner, 1989). Annie Hall (Allen, 1977 Best Picture). Eternal Sunshine (Kaufman/Gondry, 2004). Notting Hill (Curtis, 1999). Crazy Rich Asians (Chu, 2018).

20 titles · ranked by IQ Score

  1. 1
    Annie Hall poster, IQ Score 175/200, Masterclass tier

    Annie Hall

    Masterclass comedy, romance, drama

    Woody Allen's landmark 1977 Best Picture winner that reinvented romantic comedy. Extraordinarily high cognitive demands, the fourth-wall breaks, nonlinear structure, split screens, animated sequences, and self-referentia…

    175/200
  2. 2
    Manhattan poster, IQ Score 171/200, Masterclass tier

    Manhattan

    Masterclass comedy, drama, romance

    Woody Allen's love letter to New York City shot in gorgeous black and white by Gordon Willis; Gershwin-scored neurotic romance that defined an era of American cinema

    171/200
  3. 3
    Some Like It Hot poster, IQ Score 156/200, Stimulating tier

    Some Like It Hot

    Stimulating comedy, romance

    Billy Wilder's 1959 comedy about two musicians disguised as women to hide from gangsters. High cognitive demands from the gender-play comedy that was shockingly progressive for its era. Some educational value from the Pr…

    156/200
  4. 4
    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind poster, IQ Score 154/200, Stimulating tier

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

    Stimulating sci-fi, romance, drama

    A man undergoes a procedure to erase memories of his ex-girlfriend. Educational about memory, love, and identity. Cognitive engagement from the non-linear narrative and the emotional logic. Entertainment from the romanti…

    154/200
  5. 5
    The Princess Bride poster, IQ Score 144/200, Stimulating tier

    The Princess Bride

    Stimulating adventure, comedy, fantasy

    Rob Reiner's framing device, a grandfather reading to a sick child, makes the film a sustained argument about how stories teach. Goldman's screenplay treats romance, swordplay, and revenge as register-shifting comedic ma…

    144/200
  6. 6
    Lost in Translation poster, IQ Score 134/200, Stimulating tier

    Lost in Translation

    Stimulating drama, romance, comedy

    A middle-aged actor and a young newlywed form a friendship during insomnia in Tokyo. Sofia Coppola's second feature is exceptional, the use of Tokyo as a displacement space and the relationship between Murray and Johanss…

    134/200
  7. 7
    Punch-Drunk Love poster, IQ Score 131/200, Stimulating tier

    Punch-Drunk Love

    Stimulating romance, comedy

    A socially anxious plunger wholesaler falls in love. Paul Thomas Anderson's most formally radical film, the color theory, Jon Brion's score, and Adam Sandler's performance create something completely unlike any other rom…

    131/200
  8. 8
    Crazy Rich Asians poster, IQ Score 129/200, Competent tier

    Crazy Rich Asians

    Competent comedy, romance

    Jon M. Chu's adaptation of Kevin Kwan's novel that committed to the Singapore class specifics rather than retrofitting them into American romcom register. The mahjong scene between Constance Wu and Michelle Yeoh is one o…

    129/200
  9. 9
    Past Lives poster, IQ Score 129/200, Competent tier

    Past Lives

    Competent drama, romance

    Examines reconnection between childhood friends separated by immigration, using temporal distance and philosophical questioning about predetermined connection.

    129/200
  10. 10
    Pretty Woman poster, IQ Score 123/200, Competent tier

    Pretty Woman

    Competent romance, comedy

    Marshall's romantic comedy looks lighter than it is. The film's structural argument is the Vivian-Edward business-mentor dynamic, not the romance. Roberts and Gere render the class anxieties with more honesty than the ge…

    123/200
  11. 11
    Clueless poster, IQ Score 122/200, Competent tier

    Clueless

    Competent romance, comedy, teen

    Amy Heckerling's 1995 Emma adaptation set in Beverly Hills that turned out to be one of the most carefully-structured screenplays of its decade. Cher Horowitz is rare protagonist work, a character whose cluelessness is t…

    122/200
  12. 12
    Anyone But You poster, IQ Score 120/200, Competent tier

    Anyone But You

    Competent comedy, romance

    Will Gluck's 2023 enemies-to-lovers romcom set in Sydney whose Sydney Sweeney / Glen Powell chemistry is the structural payoff. The screenplay loosely adapts Much Ado About Nothing without belaboring the Shakespeare corr…

    120/200
  13. 13
    Love Actually poster, IQ Score 117/200, Competent tier

    Love Actually

    Competent romance, comedy

    Curtis's ensemble has nine intersecting stories, varying widely in quality. The Hugh Grant Prime Minister storyline reads as political wish fulfillment; the Liam Neeson stepfather thread is genuine grief work. The struct…

    117/200
  14. 14
    Sleepless in Seattle poster, IQ Score 116/200, Competent tier

    Sleepless in Seattle

    Competent romance, comedy

    Nora Ephron's 1993 romcom whose structural conceit, the two leads barely meet until the Empire State Building coda, is the most disciplined premise commitment in Ephron's catalog. The Meg Ryan / Tom Hanks first pairing i…

    116/200
  15. 15
    Bridget Jones's Diary poster, IQ Score 114/200, Competent tier

    Bridget Jones's Diary

    Competent romance, comedy

    Sharon Maguire's 2001 adaptation of Helen Fielding's novel whose Renée Zellweger / Hugh Grant / Colin Firth triangle renders Pride-and-Prejudice-via-late-'90s-London with more genre fluency than the property had any righ…

    114/200
  16. 16
    Notting Hill poster, IQ Score 113/200, Competent tier

    Notting Hill

    Competent romance, comedy

    Roger Michell's 1999 romcom whose structural achievement is the asymmetry, Hugh Grant's bookshop owner and Julia Roberts's global movie star treated as a class-mismatched relationship in which the male partner is in fact…

    113/200
  17. 17
    You've Got Mail poster, IQ Score 113/200, Competent tier

    You've Got Mail

    Competent romance, comedy

    Nora Ephron's 1998 romcom whose structural argument, that the internet was both flattening commerce and creating a new register of intimacy, turned out to be more prescient than the film initially appeared. The Meg Ryan…

    113/200
  18. 18
    10 Things I Hate About You poster, IQ Score 112/200, Competent tier

    10 Things I Hate About You

    Competent romance, comedy, teen

    Gil Junger's 1999 Taming of the Shrew adaptation set at a Seattle high school whose ensemble (Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Allison Janney) committed to the Shakespeare specifics harder than the genre…

    112/200
  19. 19
    Set It Up poster, IQ Score 111/200, Competent tier

    Set It Up

    Competent romance, comedy

    Claire Scanlon's 2018 Netflix romcom whose central conceit, two overworked assistants matchmaking their bosses, is rare workplace-romcom work that treats both class verticals as actual character material. Zoey Deutch and…

    111/200
  20. 20
    When Harry Met Sally poster, IQ Score 111/200, Competent tier

    When Harry Met Sally

    Competent romance, comedy

    Ephron's screenplay argues that platonic male-female friendship is harder than men's romantic comedies pretend. The Sally-Marie phone scenes render gendered conversation with specificity Hollywood typically skips. The pi…

    111/200
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