Movies like Love Again

Why it's similar — Ken Kwapis's ensemble dating comedy runs the same trick Love Again runs in miniature: a romantic premise built around modern miscommunication technology — voicemail, text, the unreturned phone call — and an editorial voice that keeps insisting the audience pay attention to how messages do and do not land. The reassigned-number conceit is essentially a single-couple version of Kwapis's larger structural joke.

Why it's similar — Nora Ephron's Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan film is the closest spiritual ancestor of Love Again: a widower and a woman who has never met him fall in love through a remote communication channel — a radio call-in show in 1993, a stranger's reassigned cellphone number in 2023 — and the entire film is the question of whether they will close the distance. The remote-grief premise is shared scene for scene.

Why it's similar — Lulu Wang's romantic drama is built on the same engine Love Again uses for its second act: a romantic encounter that begins under a false premise about death, and a protagonist who has to decide whether the relationship can survive the disclosure. Where Strouse uses a reassigned phone number, Wang uses a presumed-dead painter, but the structural deceit lands in the same place.

Why it's similar — Woody Allen's New York city symphony is the genre's ur-text on the romantic-comedy-with-grief register: a recently single man writing about his last relationship in real time and trying to figure out whether the next one is allowed to begin. Mira's children's-book pages function in Love Again the way Alvy's stand-up bits function in Annie Hall — a public diary made of private feeling.

Why it's similar — Allen Coulter's Robert Pattinson drama runs a slower, sadder version of the same set-up: a young man whose first significant relationship is built across a hidden premise involving the death of a parent or partner, and the question of whether the disclosure will end the love or change it. The structural rhyme is closer than the genre packaging makes it look.