Given the plethora of exceptional romantic comedies from the ’90s, only the most outstanding or popular ones have maintained their place in public memory. While films like “Notting Hill,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” and “10 Things I Hate About You” continue to be celebrated and revisited, many other gems have faded into obscurity. We’ve selected ten such films that deserve to be rediscovered and appreciated anew.

Brendan Fraser’s eclectic career path, transitioning from a ’90s action star to an Oscar-winning actor, includes ventures into various genres, with romantic comedies being no exception. A standout is 1999’s “Blast from the Past,” where Fraser portrays Adam, a man who has grown up entirely in a fallout shelter with his parents. He steps out into the world for the first time in his mid-30s, embarking on an unexpected journey.

While “Blast from the Past” was praised for its intriguing premise, critics were less enamored with its execution, and it didn’t fare well at the box office. Audiences might have been weary of the “out-of-time” trope, especially after the release of two “Austin Powers” movies in quick succession. However, revisiting the film without the weight of those expectations reveals its undeniable charm. With the ’90s now as nostalgic as the ’60s were back then, the film’s nostalgic appeal is all the more enchanting today.

Adam’s father (Christopher Walken) is initially the only one who leaves the shelter for supplies, but Adam is forced to take over when his aging father gets too sick to make the shopping runs. During one of those trips, Adam meets Eve (Alicia Silverstone), who helps Adam navigate the strange world of the late ’90s. In the process, they fall for each other. Adam’s unique upbringing and the old fashioned values he was raised with present plenty of problems for the pair’s budding relationship.

Most critics praised the basic concept of “Blast from the Past” but weren’t in love with its execution, and it wasn’t a hit at the box office. Perhaps people were burnt out on the whole “outdated guy is a fish out of water” thing after two “Austin Powers” movies in three years. Removed from that, and the expectations of being a film released during one of the best movie years of all time, allows one to see just how charming “Blast from the Past” truly is. As a bonus, the ’90s are as nostalgic to us now as the ’60s were in the ’90s. Watching the movie today makes its old-timey charm work all that much better.

In what unfortunately become the final years of John Candy’s career, he was just starting to showcase his true acting chops. In fact, Candy documentary “I Like Me” director Colin Hanks claims Candy was one movie away from becoming a dramatic actor outright. While we never got to fully see that side of him, one of the movies that shows some of Candy’s most subdued and least silly work throughout is also, unfortunately, one of his most overlooked films. 

In what would be Candy’s only rom-com as the main male lead, “Only the Lonely” saw him play Danny Muldoon, a man closing in on 40 who has spent his entire life putting everyone else’s happiness before his own. This has especially been true for his mother, Rose (Maureen O’Hare, who had been retired from acting for nearly 20 years when she took the role), since the death of Danny’s father. Any time Danny even considers doing something for himself, such as starting a relationship with Theresa Luna (Ally Sheedy), he imagines some horrible fate befalling his mother, and uses it as an excuse to walk himself back.

The only remotely goofy things that happen in “Only the Lonely” are in Danny’s melodramatic daydreams, typically involving his mother. Candy himself gives a grounded and nuanced — but still charmingly funny — performance here, the type that he should’ve been allowed to specialize further in. That is reason enough to give “Only the Lonely” a chance, but beyond that, it’s a very sweet little film that will especially hit home to those who know what it’s like to come to love later in life … because you were too busy taking care of everyone else. 

The rom-com genre frequently addresses the age-old conundrum of the love triangle, where three people are emotionally battling one another to decide which of the two will get to pair off. This is the predicament at the heart of “The Truth About Cats & Dogs,” and the love triangle here draws from one of the most famous romantic stories in literature. 

Abbey Barnes (Janeane Garofalo) hosts the titular radio show, where she gives callers advice on how to care for their pets. One caller, Brian (Ben Chaplain), phones in for help with his dog and ends up developing a crush on Abbey. But Abbey is a radio personality whose face isn’t known to the public, and she worries that Brian won’t think she’s as attractive as she sounds. So she enlists the help of her “hot friend” Noelle (Uma Thurman) to pretend to be Abbey on her date with Brian. Needless to say, things get complicated. Especially when Noelle develops feelings for Brian and he, likewise, is conflicted about being charmed by both the person he knows from the radio, and the individual he has gotten to know in person.

The premise is loosely based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which has served as the source material for a number of rom-coms over the years, including Steve Martin’s “Roxanne.” Looking past the part where we’re supposed to see Garofalo as the “ugly friend” archetype, which is ridiculous, “The Truth About Cats & Dogs” is a hilarious and heartfelt film that doesn’t deserve to have fallen into relative obscurity. 

Admittedly, “I Like It Like That” is as much a drama about a woman named Lisette Linares (Lauren Vélez) struggling to make a better life for her and her three children in the South Bronx as it is a romance of any kind. But the Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus declares it “a richly textured romantic comedy,” so we’re taking that as an excuse to get more people to revisit this 1994 gem from writer/director Darnell Martin in her feature length debut.

Lisette’s husband, Chino (Jon Seda), is a good provider for the family even if he’s far from a model husband. He’s not only having an affair with a neighbor, but the neighbor subsequently claims that Chino fathered her new baby. Between this revelation, and Chino going to jail when he joins the looting during a blackout, Lisette realizes that she can’t rely on Chino to be the breadwinner any longer. She lucks into a job as a personal assistant to a record producer, who she subsequently sleeps with to get even with Chino for cheating.

Doesn’t sound like a typical rom-com, does it? Perhaps romantic drama would be a more apt description for “I Like It Like That.” The fact that Lisette and Chino never stop trying to make their marriage work, or forget why they fell in love to begin with in spite of the very bumpy road that is their relationship, is the foundation the whole movie is built upon. While it was critically acclaimed, “I Like It Like That” deserves to be seen by more people. It isn’t part of enough conversations about the great movies of the decade; romantic, drama, or otherwise.

In the ’90s, it seemed like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were actors who always showed up in each other’s movies. But that reputation was due almost entirely to their pairing in just two films — “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.” Point of fact, they made three movies together, with the third being 1990’s “Joe Versus the Volcano.” This inventive rom-com sees Ryan play three completely different women — two of them sisters — who each play important roles in the journey that Hanks’ Joe takes throughout the film. 

First, there’s DeDe, Joe’s colleague at the depressing factory office he works in at the start of the film. Joe and DeDe go on just one date, which is going well until Joe tells her he has an incurable “brain cloud” and has only months to live. She doesn’t take the news well. Joe then meets sisters Angelica and Patricia, daughters of an eccentric businessman named Samuel (Lloyd Bridges). Samuel convinces Joe to give his death more purpose than his life had by sacrificing himself in a volcano to appease the god of a superstitious island tribe. It’s Patricia, his guide on the boat ride to the island, that Joe ultimately connects with — giving him something to live for and questioning how he wants to spend his final days. 

Critics were lukewarm on “Joe Versus the Volcano,” and it didn’t make much of a dent at the box office. It’s since gone on to become a full-fledged cult classic.

When “But I’m a Cheerleader” was first released in 1999, critics had plenty of thoughts about it. CNN called it “a smug little comedy that tries to mock other people’s self-righteousness while ignoring its own.” Premiere described it as “obvious, labored, and not particularly clever.” And the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette labeled the movie’s script “watered-downed John Waters — a grotesque burlesque of a gay chick-flick.” It’s difficult not to assume that most of the hate “But I’m a Cheerleader” got in its day was the result of a generation of film critics who weren’t quite ready for it.

“But I’m a Cheerleader” tells the story of Megan Bloomfield (Natasha Lyonne), who is trying as hard as she can to portray herself as a typical, all-American, straight teenage girl. But her parents begin to notice things, up to and including the fact that she spends a lot of time staring at her fellow cheerleaders. So they send Megan to a conversion camp designed to straighten out “confused” girls. It’s there that she meets Graham Eaton (Clea DuVall) whom Megan develops feelings for that become too strong to brush off.

It’s a biting satire that pokes fun at gender norms and societal assumptions about what constitutes “straight behavior” and “gay behavior,” with a charming coming of age rom-com at the center. Not surprisingly, it has grown in esteem over the years, particularly in the LGBTQ+ community. The website AfterEllen called it one of the five best lesbian movies of all time, and it is generally considered an essential entry in the queer film canon. That said, it can be enjoyed by anyone who enjoys stories of young love in the face of all kinds of adversity. 

Most of the movies on this list were either disliked in their time, or were only appreciated by their specific target demographic. However, there were just so many rom-coms released in the ’90s that some simply got lost in the shuffle. They weren’t doing anything particularly unique to help them stand out, nor could they find a dedicated fandom to lead them down the road toward becoming a cult hit.

“Only You” is the pinnacle of this kind of movie. The premise is that a young girl becomes convinced that she will one day meet her soulmate named Damon Bradley, a name that she learned first from a Oujia board and later, also, a fortune teller. As an adult, Faith Corvatch (Marisa Tomei) finds out that she has a mutual friend in common with a Damon Bradley, and travels all the way to Italy to meet him. While chasing down Damon, Faith ends up meeting a man named Peter Wright (Robert Downey Jr.) and they hit it off. But she’s torn between letting things progress with Peter, and saving herself for her supposedly fated soulmate.

It’s pretty standard rom-com fare, certainly. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Tomei and Downey Jr. have fantastic chemistry, and it’s impossible not to root for them — which are two of the most crucial ingredients for a rom-com. If “Only You” had been put on constant TV rotation like some of the decade’s heavy hitters, it would make just as many lists of the best ’90s rom-coms. Instead, it’s a highlight on lists of the most underrated ’90s rom-coms — like the one you’re reading now.  

Few filmmakers can claim a more varied body of work than Ang Lee. He’s gone from effects-heavy fantasy epics like “Life of Pi” to acclaimed martial arts masterpieces like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Lee even did a “Hulk” movie that is way better than you remember. But Lee has always seemed to be drawn to stories about complicated and/or unrequited love, and he’s just as masterful at telling such stories as he is in delivering grand adventures. 

To be fair, calling Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” underrated is a bit of a misnomer. It has a 94% critics score and an 87% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and was even nominated for a best foreign-language film Oscar. It is less the “underrated” angle and more the “rewatching” angle of this list where “The Wedding Banquet” earns its spot. It tells the story of gay couple Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) and Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), who are out to everyone — that is, except for Wai-Tung’s very traditional Taiwanese parents.

Wai-Tung’s friend Wei-Wei (May Chin) needs a green card, so Wai-Tung has the idea to marry her to make her a citizen and also placate his parents. It’s already a flawed plan, of course, but it’s made all the more complicated when Wai-Tung’s parents plan a huge celebration for the sham marriage. 

The “gay man pretends to have a girlfriend to fool his family but it all blows up in his face” angle isn’t unique to “The Wedding Banquet,” but no other movie has done it better. A remake of the same name starring Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone was released in 2025. That version is admittedly great, but the original is still superior. 

Nobody bats an eye when a movie, rom-com or otherwise, has a mostly white cast. Surely, assumes reasonable people, it wouldn’t be an issue if someone makes a rom-com with an almost entirely Black cast. And yet, when “Boomerang” was released in 1992, co-written by and starring Eddie Murphy, it received backlash for inanely racial reasons. Describing the baffling critical response to “Boomerang” for an editorial he penned for the L.A. Times shortly after the movie’s release, Murphy wrote, “some people obviously have a problem with that, for the movie has been called a ‘fantasy,’ a ‘reverse world’ and ‘racist.’”

Black actors and filmmakers should be allowed to make movies about their lives and their communities without those movies becoming lighting rods for racial discourse. But because “Boomerang” got wrapped up in oversensitive white nonsense, a lot of people missed out on not only one of the best rom-coms of the decade, but one of Murphy’s best and most understated performances. 

Murphy plays Marcus Graham, a successful advertising exec and notorious ladies man who goes out of his way to nitpick the women he sleeps with so he doesn’t have to risk falling for them. But when he meets Jacqueline Boyer (Robin Givens), who is basically the female version of him, she gives Marcus a taste of his own medicine. It gets him to realize what it feels like to have your heart toyed with — inspiring him to actually start following his own for the first time.

That “Boomerang” wasn’t immediately hailed as another Eddie Murphy classic, and wasn’t welcomed into the rom-com pantheon without a fight, can only be explained by the ridiculous “issues” critics made up. It’s already a classic Black rom-com, but it should also just be considered a classic rom-com, period.  

As it goes with most actors who don’t exclusively work in this genre, discussions of Kevin Kline’s best and worst movies tend not to address his romantic comedy output. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it means he hasn’t made any that are egregiously terrible enough to be his worst films — and as any Hollywood leading man who worked in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s can tell you, it wasn’t easy to avoid getting cast in crummy rom-coms. But for Kline, it also means that his greatest movies will always outshine his underrated ones, including his 1995 rom-com “French Kiss” which pairs him with the rom-com queen, Meg Ryan.

Ryan plays Kate, whose happily ever after is derailed when her fiancée (Timothy Hutton) falls for a French woman on a business trip. Kate decides to travel to Paris in an attempt to win him back, and on her way there, she unknowingly becomes an accomplice to a crime by a thief and con artist named Luc (Kline). Kate initially tries to disentangle herself from Luc and his schemes, but soon ropes him into helping her make her fiancée jealous by pretending that she and Luc are lovers. 

Obviously you can tell where all this is going, but it’s still a silly and charming journey to its by-the-numbers conclusion. We are still talking about rom-coms, after all. Ryan’s powers as a romantic lead are well established, but Kline is also a delight here. It would have been fun to see him do more lighthearted work on the level of “French Kiss.”