Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like One Year to Live, Buy a Man:
We Live in Time
We Live in Time is a love story that knows early on it is racing a clock. John Crowley shuffles the timeline of a decade-long relationship between Florence Pugh’s chef Almut and Andrew Garfield’s Tobias, so a chaotic first meeting, a birth and a cancer diagnosis all sit side by side. The structure keeps the sentiment honest, and both leads give the kind of lived-in, generous performances that make a tearjerker feel earned rather than engineered.
Spoiler Alert
Spoiler Alert tells you how it ends right in the title, and somehow that only makes it hit harder. Michael Showalter adapts TV journalist Michael Ausiello’s memoir about his husband Kit’s terminal cancer, with Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge as a couple whose bond is tested and deepened by illness. It plays as a warm, funny romantic comedy for long stretches before turning into something closer to a grief diary, and it handles that shift with real care.
Don’t Say Good Luck
Don’t Say Good Luck is not the Happy Madison movie you might expect. Sunny Sandler takes the lead opposite Melanie Lynskey in a cancer dramedy with a musical-theater streak, trading the company’s usual broad gags for something gentler and more sincere. For anyone drawn to the way One Year to Live, Buy a Man finds lightness and warmth inside a frightening diagnosis, this Netflix release is a natural next stop.
Love of Your Life
Love of Your Life commits to both halves of its premise: finding the right person, and learning to live after losing them. Rachel Morrison directs Margaret Qualley and Aaron Pierre in a Prime Video romance about heartbreak, recovery and second chances, and Qualley’s unguarded, slightly off-kilter energy keeps it from ever feeling like a greeting card. It is affecting in exactly the ways a good weepie should be.
Anora
Sean Baker’s Anora starts where plenty of fairy tales would end. Mikey Madison plays Ani, a Brooklyn exotic dancer who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, only for his family’s hired muscle to arrive and try to undo the whole thing. Like One Year to Live, Buy a Man, it is a romance that begins as a transaction, and Baker mines that setup for screwball chaos and genuine heartbreak on his way to the Palme d’Or.
Materialists
Materialists is a movie obsessed with what love costs. Celine Song follows Dakota Johnson’s Lucy, a New York matchmaker who sizes up her clients like assets, as she weighs a wealthy suitor played by Pedro Pascal against a broke ex played by Chris Evans. The film is most interesting when it interrogates the math people do when choosing a partner, even if it struggles to break new ground after Song’s stunning debut.
Past Lives
Past Lives remains one of the most quietly devastating romances of the decade. Celine Song’s debut follows Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), childhood sweethearts separated when her family emigrates from Seoul, who reconnect across decades as she builds a life and a marriage in New York. It is a film about roads not taken, and Song directs every glance and silence with startling confidence.
Punch-Drunk Love
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is a romantic comedy that plays like an anxiety attack set to a lush score. Adam Sandler is Barry Egan, a lonely, rage-prone novelty-goods salesman who stumbles into love with Emily Watson’s Lena while getting shaken down by a phone-sex extortion scheme. It is strange, tender and very funny, and proof that a love story about two odd people finding each other can still feel electric.
Crossing Delancey
Crossing Delancey is a romantic comedy that deserves a much bigger audience. Joan Micklin Silver’s 1988 film stars Amy Irving as Izzy, a single Manhattan bookstore employee whose grandmother quietly hires a matchmaker to pair her with Sam, a pickle vendor played by Peter Riegert. It is a gentle, observant story about the gap between what we think we want in a partner and what actually makes us happy.
Possible Love
Possible Love marks Lee Chang-dong’s first feature since Burning, and the Korean master has lost none of his patience. Jeon Do-yeon, Sol Kyung-gu and Zo In-sung lead a Netflix drama that circles class, desire and exploitation, letting tension simmer rather than boil. Fans of East Asian love stories that refuse to rush, and that leave plenty unsaid between their characters, should put it near the top of their watchlist.
READ MORE: Movies Like Past Lives, Movies Like Anora, Movies Like Materialists
