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This weekend, we celebrate love and its cinematic expression, the rom-com. Two out today, Marry Me and I Want You Back, are testaments to the genre’s resilience amid the modern onslaught of sequels and superhero movies, David Sims argues.

No matter your taste in movies, and whether you’re observing Valentine’s weekend alone, with a special someone, or with pals, we’ve got an option for you to curl up with. I asked my colleague Shirley Li to select five films that’ll make your heart flutter, regardless of what mood you’re in ahead of the holiday.

1. The modern classic: Before Sunrise

“The best romantic movies understand that the potency of love needs no embellishing, and Richard Linklater’s seminal drama, the first in his indelible trilogy, keeps things as simple as they come,” Shirley told me. The film, which follows two strangers who meet on a train and decide to disembark together, is “sweet and earnest—and quietly compelling.”

Where to watch: On Tubi

2. The new release for the person who’s already seen everything: Marry Me

This is Notting Hill, “if Notting Hill were set Stateside and the celebrity in question was a pop star left heartbroken moments before her livestreamed publicity stunt of a wedding,” Shirley explained. “Sure, it’s predictably absurd and absurdly predictable, but Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson exude an old-school appeal.”

Where to watch: In theaters and on Peacock

3. The salty choice that’s ambivalent about love: The Worst Person in the World

Hot off the prestige-film-festival circuit, Worst Person skewers the idea of a soul mate. What unfolds instead is “a devastatingly resonant portrait of an unsettled generation” that defies genre, our critic David Sims writes. It “swerves from bustling comedy to erotically charged romance to bittersweet drama, executing each tonal shift seamlessly even as plot twists seem to come out of nowhere.”

Where to watch: In theaters

4. The perfect “Palentine’s Day” pick: Someone Great

February 13, also known as Galentine’s Day, has recently become popular as the date to celebrate the friendships that help us get by. This 2019 breakup film “isn’t so much a story about losing one’s boyfriend as it is about growing up and entering the scary territory of your 30s,” David wrote in his 2019 review.

Where to watch: On Netflix

5. The Die Hard–style option that’s only debatably on-theme: Venom

What’s more romantic than a movie about an alien parasite? Venom “is, at its heart, a will-they-won’t-they story—a grisly meet-cute between a down-on-his-luck reporter and a grumpy, gloppy little extraterrestrial with a really big appetite,” David argued in 2018. The dynamic between this untraditional pair is the reason to watch this otherwise clunky film. (David also reviewed last year’s so-bad-it’s-good sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage.)

Where to watch: On Starz, or pay to rent online

Have a movie you plan to watch this weekend? Tell us.

Pedro Nunes / Reuters

Explore the week that was. Our senior editor Alan Taylor compiles photos from around the world.

Read. Pick one of eight southern travelogues recommended by Imani Perry. Or try one of our staff picks for the winter season.

Watch. Get ready for the Oscars by streaming a Best Picture nominee, such as Dune or The Power of the Dog.

Or try a new release:

Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi, which stars Zoë Kravitz, is a techno-thriller for the COVID age. Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall is like Independence Day, but terrible—and yet, still entertaining. In Jackass Forever, the franchise reinvents itself once more.

Jumping to the small screen … Skip Shonda Rhimes’s new Netflix show on the grifter Anna Delvey; it’s a letdown. Instead, try HBO Max’s new miniseries The Girl Before, which offers a modern twist on a haunted house.

Listen. Episode two of The Experiment’s new series on SPAM explores how the canned meat built a town—and tore it apart.

Watch some sports. The Olympics are on (see what’s scheduled). So is the Super Bowl (although sports betting might ruin it).

Embrace being tardy. “I choose lateness,” James Parker writes in his latest Ode. “It gives me velocity. I veer through crowds; I hurdle over interference.”

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

The Girl Before, a sleek, sinister new miniseries on HBO Max, has all the hallmarks of the “girl, etc” genre that’s dominated thrillers since Gillian Flynn published Gone Girl a decade ago. There’s a girl, actually a woman: Jane (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who becomes fixated on the fate of another girl (also actually a woman) who lived in her house before her. There’s a traumatic backstory for both women that slowly unfurls over four episodes, secrets, red herrings, enough wine to sink a freighter, more secrets, a seductive but controlling man bearing gifts. Pass the chardonnay, in other words. It’s women-driven crime-thriller time.

But what caught my attention, and kept it, was the house at the center. The premise of the show—based on a book by the British thriller writer J. P. Delaney—is that Jane, after experiencing a profound personal loss, moves into a minimalist home in London designed by a celebrated architect, Edward (David Oyelowo). An austere temple of polished concrete, glass, and angular light, 1 Folgate Street is offered at an affordable rent to tenants who meet the architect’s criteria and agree to live up to his standards. They have to agree to hundreds of arbitrary-seeming rules set by the architect: no smoking, no pets, but also no clutter, no books, no pictures on the walls, no children. The house is equipped with an AI that tracks the moods and movements of its residents. “Housekeeper,” as it’s called, is soon revealed to be more like Mrs. Danvers than Siri, programmed to have controlling tendencies and dark instincts of its own.

I’ll confess here that the house is evil plotlines are among my favorites. If you’ve scrolled through enough real-estate listings, you’ve likely come across a home that just seems wrong: bookshelves too tightly spaced to contain actual books, walls tilted strangely, windows too small or too narrow, stairs that lead nowhere. (The house I moved into last year contains what I immediately named the “murder basement,” complete with plastic bins I still haven’t dared peek into.) The great horror writer Shirley Jackson, in The Haunting of Hill House, described the way a cursed mansion’s “maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned” it “into a place of despair,” a description that conveys the sense that houses can be as vicious and as twisted as people. The mere appearance of the House of Usher, in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, pervades the narrator’s spirit with “insufferable gloom”; its “bleak walls” and “vacant eye-like windows” induce what he describes as “a sickening of the heart.” Whether the houses are actually malign or just preying on the darker impulses of the people who enter them is often left chillingly ambiguous.

[Read: The real horror in The Haunting of Hill House]

The Girl Before, adapted by Delaney with Marissa Lestrade, and directed by Lisa Brühlmann, takes the old idea of the haunted house and inverts it. Instead of rooms filled with forbidding portraits and molding clutter, 1 Folgate Street contains hardly anything at all. It has no skeletons in its closets (it barely has closets at all—there’s a single one for clothes, a reminder that residents should exorcize everything from their lives except the perfect essentials). If the house contains evil, it’s found in the aesthetics. This is architecture created to control. “All buildings are designed to have an effect on people,” Edward tells Jane in the second episode. “Castles to intimidate. Churches to inspire. Why shouldn’t a house be designed to give you a framework to live by?” His philosophy is that people, like buildings, require rigid foundations to elevate themselves.

Amanda Searle / HBO Max

The story itself is very silly, involving doppelgängers and death, a fleet of bad men (burglars, abusers, partners who insist on picking one’s outfits), even supposed ancient rites of human sacrifice. Jane’s story is juxtaposed with that of Emma (Jessica Plummer), the resident who lived in the house before her, whose life became similarly enmeshed with the home and its architect, and whose death is revealed fairly early on. The show draws parallels between the two women, but also fascinating, unspoken distinctions. Emma is younger, more enthusiastic, untidier, more idealistic; Jane is glacial, reticent, composed. The two women have professional disparities, too. Emma is a former assistant trying to break into marketing; Jane is a financial executive. Emma flouts the rules of the house with chaotic regularity; Jane greets them as a kind of liberating system, a freedom from the messiness of choice.

Inevitably, Jane finds traces of Emma within the house and begins to investigate what happened to her. Despite some of its more predictable twists, The Girl Before is riveting, even counterintuitive. Brühlmann, the director, takes material stuffed with clichés and gives it a subtler texture. The house, created by the production designer Jon Henson, is smooth and bloodless, a diagram of clean lines and monochromatism. The omnipresence of Housekeeper and its malevolent interventions—it blasts jarring music out of the blue, and withholds heat and electricity until certain obligations have been met—suggests an episode of Black Mirror; when Jane discovers a secret cupboard in one of the house’s walls, it reveals banks of servers humming and throbbing as though they’re alive. The show’s design is so deliberate that small details take on heavier significance. A bouquet of flowers in yellow and pink is an aggressively colorful statement, a man’s dirty sneakers a visual invasion of the ascetic concrete. Mbatha-Raw is so restrained and controlled as Jane that an eye roll from her can feel like an outburst. Oyelowo, similarly precise, is a terrifyingly charismatic and quiet authoritarian.

For all its more formulaic components, the show extends a well-worn novelistic trope, the house as a stand-in for the self, in a disquieting direction: Edward’s home is presented as an idealized version of a “better” self that residents should aspire to conform to. One of the reasons the female-driven crime story—currently being parodied by Kristen Bell on a Netflix series titled The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window—became so popular is for all the ways it explores a rot in the domestic sphere, a glut of homes secretly riddled with loathing and longing and ennui. In The Girl Before, both Emma and Jane move into 1 Folgate Street because disturbing events have destabilized their sense of home—what it means, what it should be. They’re drawn to the house for what it represents: the literal rendering of an optimized life. “Living in a different way, a different place, I think it’ll help,” Jane tells a friend who’s perturbed by her extensive new tenancy agreement. But escaping a haunted house—or your own darker impulses—is rarely as simple as leaving.