Movies like No Hard Feelings

Why it's similar — The Last Summer runs the same pre-college threshold the No Hard Feelings third act pivots on — a small group of teenagers in the months between a high-school graduation and a freshman-year move-in date — and uses the summer-town setting as the timer the romance has to beat. Percy's pre-Princeton anxiety and the entire ensemble of K. J. Apa's Last Summer share the same calendar.

Why it's similar — Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's Gina Rodriguez film is the closest tonal sibling to No Hard Feelings's Maddie-and-Sara scenes — three women in their late twenties or early thirties arguing through a long late-summer New York night about whether the lives they have walked into are the lives they wanted. The friendship-scene register and the working-class-urban setting are shared.

Why it's similar — Sam Weisman's three-divorced-dads ensemble plays the same comedy-of-uncomfortable-emotional-disclosure register Stupnitsky uses in the No Hard Feelings third act: a small social network being forced to admit to itself the shape of an arrangement it has been pretending was something else. The mid-90s suburban-comedy spine is closer to Stupnitsky's structural instincts than the year's other R-rated comps.

Why it's similar — Sex Appeal pairs an inexperienced lead with a transactional sexual-rehearsal premise that runs into honest emotion, in the same comic register No Hard Feelings sets up around Percy. Both films lean on a contract between the leads as the picture's organising tension and refuse to resolve it cleanly until the final reel disclosure.

Why it's similar — American Pie 2 is the genre's load-bearing summer-house template — pre-college friends renting a beach house for the months before freshman year, sex comedy braided with emotional reckoning, a third-act pivot from raunch to sincerity. Stupnitsky is working in a more recent register but the structural debt to the Pie-era summer-house comedy is open.