NÃO PERCA: The 14 Best Valentine’s Day Movies to Stream on Prime Video in 2026 🍿
There are few — blessedly few! — movies that are actually about Valentine’s Day, the understanding being that any manner of love story, whether rom-com, historical romance, erotic thriller, or romantic drama, might fulfill your Fake Holiday needs and your personal tastes. This also means it can be difficult to narrow down the many choices on a streaming service like Prime Video, which does indeed have the 2010 film actually entitled Valentine’s Day. (Don’t do it! It’s real bad!)
Thankfully, Decider is here to comb through the options and make some recommendations — and what’s more, we’ve selected 14 titles that are currently streaming free for Prime Video members. None of these are paid rentals. They’re all ready to go, so you can spend that money on chocolate or champagne or whatever else. These titles do indeed range from screwball classics to underseen indie gems to mainstream ’90s mainstays. There’s even a ridiculous straight-to-streaming movie starring a Riverdale alumnus in there, because we know your tastes contain multitudes.
Prime Video isn’t as well-known for its original rom-com output as Netflix, which has made it something of a cottage industry. But while Maintenance Required isn’t an instant classic, it’s more genuinely cute and cinematic-looking than a lot of what Netflix has on offer. This knockoff of You’ve Got Mail casts Riverdale’s Madelaine Petsch as a sexy mechanic running a mom-and-pop car-repair joint, unaware that her anonymous car-forum internet pen pal is actually Beau (Jacob Scipio), the manager of a corporate-owned repair shop that’s opened up across the street. They’re IRL rivals and online soulmates! It’s all pretty PG-13, but Petsch’s various mechanic outfits and tank tops are so stylish that it almost qualifies as a fetish video, and Scipio is plenty handsome, too. Sometimes you just need something sexy and stupid.
A lot of rom-coms really fall down on the “com” side of things; I Want You Back has the not-so-secret weapons of Charlie Day and Jenny Slate, two genuinely funny goofballs who know their way around dialogue riffing that doesn’t sound like labored placeholding. They play two recently dumped individuals who do a little Strangers on a Train action, agreeing to kill off each other’s exes’ relationships (relax, it’s not a real murder story) in hope that their beloveds will come crawling back. What do you reckon happens instead? The movie does a neat job of delaying the inevitable not through frustration but with surprisingly affecting longing, particularly from the usually-antic Day.
Science fiction and romance are most frequently mixed by throwing a love interest into a sci-fi adventure; Molli and Max in the Future, on the other hand, is a full-on relationship movie with a lovingly crafted low-budget futuristic backdrop. Set a “billion years” in the future, it follows the repeated intersections of Molli (Zosia Mamet) and Max (Aristotle Athari) as they figure each other, and themselves, out. For all of the movie’s Futurama-ish silliness, it’s quite sincere in its matters of the heart, and though the visual effects aren’t cutting edge, they are boundless inventive in terms of what the filmmakers are willing to visualize.
There are certain 1990s romance components that are almost impossible to avoid, no matter how you might personally feel about them. Notting Hill helpfully gathers a bunch into a single film: Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, and semi-insufferable screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually) teamed up for this romance about a movie star (Roberts, naturally) forming an unexpected connection with a bookseller (Grant). Even if you’re hesitant about either star, they complement each other surprisingly well, especially compared to some of their other famous co-stars: Grant is funnier and more charming than Richard Gere, while Roberts is livelier than Andie McDowell. Plus, Notting Hill is a lot less insistent than Curtis’s opus Love Actually, and no one will make you watch it every Christmas.
Before he specialized almost exclusively in nouveau-Amblin smarm, Ryan Reynolds had a brief romantic-leading-man period, most famously opposite Sandra Bullock in The Proposal. But Definitely Maybe is a more grown-up option, less farcical but more emotionally involving as a dad (Reynolds) relates his romantic history to his daughter (Abigail Breslin) when she asks how he met her mother. Yes, it’s not unlike the TV show you just thought of, but Reynolds dials the quips down way below sitcom levels, and he’s paired with three particularly strong scene partners in Elizabeth Banks, Rahcel Weisz, and Isla Fisher, tracing idealism and disillusionment as a Gen Xer during the Clinton ’90s.
Admittedly, Loving is as much a historical drama as a romance, maybe moreso. But this story of the court case that challenged Virginia laws against interracial marriage is enormously moving in a perfectly understated way, with quiet and affecting work from Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as the couple at the center of the legal battle. If you prefer your love stories in a more subtle register, and/or with ample historical context, Loving offers both with great sensitivity.
If you’d have pitched me a rom-com where the leads don’t meet until the end, I probably would have said you were crazy. By the power of Ephron, though, (and a little Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks magic), our two leads finally meet atop the Empire State Building after many a hijinx, and there isn’t even a grand, dramatic. As soon as Sam offers his hand and they share a knowing glance, there’s really nothing else to say. I dare you not to cry at that score. They don’t make ’em like this anymore, folks. – JB
Where to stream Sleepless in Seattle Everett Collection
Yes, it’s yet another romance that is not quite You’ve Got Mail. (That classic isn’t available to Prime Video subscribers, though you can rent it.) But the first teaming of Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and writer-director Nora Ephorn does its own thing. Hanks play a widower whose young son calls in a national radio show for advice about helping his sad old man; Ryan plays a journalist who becomes increasingly convinced that she’s fallen in love upon first listen. Their eventual Empire State Building rendezvous inspired by the old weepie An Affair to Remember, which gets explicitly shouted out in Ephron’s screenplay. Compared to You’ve Got Mail (or, for that matter, Joe vs. the Volcano), there’s less Hanks-Ryan repartee – almost none, in fact, because they barely share any screen time by design. But it’s not for nothing that this one was included in the Criterion Channel’s yearning-themed romance collection this month. Sleepless in Seattle became a big hit in part because Ephron keys into how often our ideas about romance are the sum of our cultural influences telling us what love should look like.
It’s a flawed romance to say the least; F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t really writing about the nature of love, per se, with his Great American Novel, but American notions of success and class. But then, for the story to work, especially on screen, there has to be a glittering sense of romance to the presentation, both in the relationship between Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his lost love Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and the friendship between Gatsby and Daisy’s cousin Nick (Tobey Maguire). Baz Luhrmann certainly understands both glittering and romance, and works in some of his trademark intentional anachronisms to depict the roaring ’20s in all their decadence. All told, this is probably about as good a Gatsby picture as possible, with terrific work from DiCaprio and Mulligan.
Some of the most memorable 1930s romances tend to move quickly, prioritizing screwball antics over lovey-dovey stuff. Isn’t that, in its own way, deeply romantic? Screwball pro William Powell plays Godfrey, an unhoused “forgotten man” recruited by a kindhearted if stubborn rich girl Irene (Carole Lombard) to win a scavenger hunt – and then hired to serve as her family’s butler. Irene falls hard for him, and the somewhat aloof Godfrey seems to gradually cotton to her. Fake fainting, stock shorting, sniping sisters… this one has it all. A warning, though: The speed and wit of My Man Godfrey might make 2000s-era rom-coms look terminally dull thereafter.
Steven Soderbergh has brought surprising romantic and sexual heat to the trunk of a car (Out of Sight) and a run-down strip club (Magic Mike), so why not the world of international intrigue? This dark-yet-optimistic comedy-thriller of marriage is like a classic screwball farce fused with a betrayal-heavy espionage noir, with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married spies in the thick of a mole hunt. This somehow leads to several awkward dinner parties, and if that doesn’t sound like typical Valentine’s Day fare, but check out the way that Fassbender looks at Blanchett, and the way she looks him at him looking at her, and it’ll all make sense, well before the knotty, clever plot does.
If you think of Barbara Stanwyck mainly as the femme fatale from Double Indemnity (or, worse, don’t think of her much at all!), you owe it to yourself to check out her surprisingly robust catalog of romantic comedies, of which Ball of Fire is a major highlight. Gary Cooper plays the ringleader of a nerdy cadre of professors who are working on a massive encyclopedia project, and wind up recruiting a nightclub performer (Stanwyck) to help them with the section on contemporary slang. She hides out from the police and/or the mob at the professors’ home, teaches them to loosen up, and yes, falls in love with the main nerd. All in all, a much more above-board and believable fantasy than Revenge of the Nerds.
The Couple: Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone)
Their Fate: At its core, La La Land proves to be less about love and more about dreams, and while Mia and Sebastian’s love story is initially charming and enviable, it deteriorates when they both become so wrapped up in their own careers they realize that they can’t be there for one another. After a long separation and reconciling, they acknowledge that they’re always going to love each other, even if they don’t know what the future holds. In the end, they both get the careers they always wanted, and Mia marries and has a baby with someone else. They share a wordless acknowledgment of the love they once had when Mia happens to visit Seb’s jazz club, and that’s the end of that.
[Where to Stream La La Land] Photo: Everett Collection
Almost a decade removed from the weird Oscar kerfuffle between this movie and Moonlight, it’s easier to appreciate La La Land for what it really is: A lushly colored, swoonworthy, and ultimately achingly bittersweet romantic musical made with an abiding love for the classics but a keen sense of modern cinema. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling made two much weaker films before this one, which gave them an instant spark of familiarity while still allowing plenty of room for them to do something new – namely, sing and dance in the sweet spot between overpolished pro and embarrassing amateur.
Jonathan Demme updated ’40s screwball with a dose of ’80s crime comedy, in a movie that lands somewhere between Bringing Up Baby and After Hours. (It’s also a clear influence on Punch-Drunk Love.) A mild-mannered banker (Jeff Daniels) gets swept up in the unpredictable world of a wild-card woman (Melanie Griffith) and finds himself eventually beguiled, even when this leads to confrontations with a violent creep (Ray Liotta!). So many subsequent rom-coms have watered this formula down into Manic Pixie Sitcom nonsense, which is a shame but also leaves Demme’s film still feeling as alive and electric – and, yeah as romantic – as ever.
Look, if your streaming service has an Audrey Hepburn romance on hand, you should watch it. Prime Video’s current Hepburn vehicle is Charade, which (oddly characteristic of Hepburn’s heyday) pairs her with an older star from a slightly earlier Hollywood era, in this case a just-pre-retirement Cary Grant. Hepburn’s frequent collaborator Stanley Donen does his best Hitchcock impression for the occasion, sending the pair through a series of capers and deceptions, while still putting his own colorful imprint on the material. The 30-year age gap between Hepburn and Grant should rankle (and for some it might), but man, Hepburn is too good at (eventually) acting smitten with her screen partner. She could make damn near anyone her valentine.
If you aren’t a Prime Video subscriber yet, you can get started with a 30-day Amazon Prime free trial, including Prime perks like the Prime Video streaming service, free two-day shipping, exclusive deals, and more. After the free trial, Amazon Prime costs $14.99/month or $139/year.
All 18- to 24-year-olds, regardless of student status, are eligible for a discounted Prime for Young Adults membership as well, with age verification. After a six-month free trial, you’ll pay 50% off the standard Prime monthly price of $14.99/month — just $7.49/month — for up to six years and get all the perks.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
📢 Gostou da notícia? Compartilhe com os amigos!
Este artigo é uma tradução automática de uma fonte original. Para ler o conteúdo na íntegra: Clique aqui.