Movies like Ali & Ava (2022)
The best movies like Ali & Ava (2022) are Black Tea (2024), 45 Years (2015) and Empire of Light (2022). If Ali & Ava hooked you with its drama and romance, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedCall Me by Your Name (2017)8.1/10 from 13,046 votes
- NewestAankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan (2025)Released 2025
Black Tea (2024)
Aya, a young Ivorian woman in her early thirties, says no on her wedding day, to everyone’s astonishment. After emigrating to Asia, she works in a tea export shop with Cai, a 45-year-old Chinese man. Aya and Cai fall in love but can their affair survive the turmoil of their past and other people’s prejudices?
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this45 Years (2015)
There is just one week until Kate Mercer's 45th wedding anniversary and the planning for the party is going well. But then a letter arrives for her husband. The body of his first love has been discovered, frozen and preserved in the icy glaciers of the Swiss Alps. By the time the party is upon them, five days later, there may not be a marriage left to celebrate.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisEmpire of Light (2022)
The duty manager of a seaside cinema, who is struggling with her mental health, forms a relationship with a new employee on the south coast of England in the 1980s.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBlue Valentine (2010)
Dean and Cindy live a quiet life in a modest neighborhood. They appear to have the world at their feet at the outset of the relationship. However, his lack of ambition and her retreat into self-absorption cause potentially irreversible cracks in their marriage.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPhantom Thread (2017)
In 1950s London, a renowned dressmaker's meticulous lifestyle begins drastically changing as his relationship with his young muse intensifies.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Blue Caftan (2023)
A middle-aged tailor and his wife find their relationship challenged by the arrival of a handsome new apprentice.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisDisobedience (2018)
New York photographer Ronit flies to London after learning about the death of her estranged father. Ronit is returning to the same Orthodox Jewish community that shunned her decades earlier for her childhood attraction to Esti, a female friend. Their fortuitous and happy reunion soon reignites their burning passion as the two women explore the boundaries of faith and sexuality.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Lawyer (2020)
Marius is a highly successful lawyer based in Vilnius. He becomes obsessed with Ali, a handsome Syrian refugee he first encounters in an online chatroom run out of Belgrade. Marius is rich and enjoys a vibrant social and cultural life. Nevertheless, he feels that something is missing from it. The journey from Lithuania to Serbia is a relatively short one, but can the two navigate their way through the gulf that separates their very different lives? And how do they deal with the precarious obstacles of the physical borders that stand between them? Written and directed by Romas Zabarauskas, The Lawyer questions assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant and the possibilities offered by life in contemporary Europe.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
God's Own Country (2017)
A young farmer in rural Yorkshire numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCall Me by Your Name (2017)
In the summer of 1983, a 17-year-old Elio spends his days in his family's villa in Italy. One day Oliver, a graduate student, arrives to assist Elio's father, a professor of Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisPast Lives (2023)
After decades apart, childhood friends Nora and Hae Sung are reunited in New York for one fateful weekend as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisBlue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Adèle's life is changed when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adele grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAşk Sadece Bir An (2025)
A young man and woman from very different backgrounds fall in love but their relationship faces obstacles from his troubled past and her overprotective parents.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
Here (2024)
In Brussels, a construction worker crosses paths with a bryologist.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
The Souvenir: Part II (2021)
In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBefore Midnight (2013)
It has been nine years since we last met Jesse and Celine, the French-American couple who once met on a train in Vienna. They now live in Paris with twin daughters but have spent a summer in Greece at the invitation of an author colleague of Jesse's. When the vacation is over and Jesse must send his teenage son off to the States, he begins to question his life decisions, and his relationship with Celine is at risk.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRust and Bone (2012)
Put in charge of his young son, Ali leaves Belgium for Antibes to live with his sister and her husband as a family. Ali's bond with Stephanie, a killer whale trainer, grows deeper after Stephanie suffers a horrible accident.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSilver Haze (2023)
23-year-old Franky is a nurse who lives with her large family in an East London borough. Obsessed with a thirst for revenge and a need to assign guilt for a traumatic event that happened 15 years before, she is unable to build any meaningful relationship until she falls in love with one of her patients – Florence. They escape to the coast where Florence lives with her more open-minded patchwork family. There, Franky finds the emotional shelter to deal with the grudges of the past.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Hepta: The Last Lecture (2016)
Based on the best-selling novel of the same title. Dr. Shukri Mokhtar is a renowned social psychology specialist, best known for his ability to answer the simplest questions, who decides to give one last lecture about the very simple question: "how do we love?" He gives a full description of the different stages of love by recounting four different love stories going through curves and various crises.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
Ordinary Love (2019)
An extraordinary look at the lives of a middle-aged couple in the midst of the wife's breast cancer diagnosis.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisPortrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisRevolutionary Road (2008)
A young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s struggle to come to terms with their personal problems while trying to raise their two children. Based on a novel by Richard Yates.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSong to Song (2017)
In this modern love story set against the Austin, Texas music scene, two entangled couples — struggling songwriters Faye and BV, and music mogul Cook and the waitress whom he ensnares — chase success through a rock ‘n’ roll landscape of seduction and betrayal.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both romance & drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisAmour (2012)
Georges and Anne are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisOn Chesil Beach (2018)
In 1962 England, a young couple finds their idyllic romance colliding with issues of sexual freedom and societal pressure, leading to an awkward and fateful wedding night.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMalcolm & Marie (2021)
As a filmmaker and his girlfriend return home from his movie premiere, smoldering tensions and painful revelations push them toward a romantic reckoning.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisA Single Man (2009)
Set in Los Angeles in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, is the story of a British college professor who dwells on the past and cannot see his future. We follow him through a single day, where a series of events and encounters ultimately lead him to decide if there is a meaning to life after the death of his long time partner, Jim.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan (2025)
When a blind musician and a theatre artist meet on a train and travel through the majestic Himalayas, they fall in love regardless of their apparent flaws. What happens when life takes over?
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Slow (2023)
Dancer Elena and sign language interpreter Dovydas meet and form a beautiful bond. As they dive into a new relationship, they must navigate how to build their own kind of intimacy.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisOnly You (2019)
A madly-in-love young couple's relationship begins to suffer when they struggle to conceive a child.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama & romance
Popcorn FlickMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Ali & Ava?
The closest matches to Ali & Ava are Black Tea (2024), 45 Years (2015) and Empire of Light (2022). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Ali & Ava?
People who watched Ali & Ava most often go on to Black Tea (2024), 45 Years (2015) and Empire of Light (2022).
What is the highest-rated movie like Ali & Ava?
Call Me by Your Name (2017), rated 8.1/10 by 13,046 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Ali & Ava?
Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like Ali & Ava?
Yes: 45 Years (2015), Empire of Light (2022) and Blue Valentine (2010).
How are movies similar to Ali & Ava chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Ali & Ava, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.