Apple TV’s All Of You is a heartfelt, emotional story about two friends who fall in love with each other over the span of several years, and the film has climbed to the top of the streaming service’s charts since its release last week. All Of You has performed well among critics, and general audiences are also beginning to fall for this charming romance.

All of You takes place in a world where people are encouraged to take a scientifically proven “test” that can provide people with their soulmate – the one person they’re destined to fall in love with and spend the rest of their life with. It’s a fascinating examination of the role that love plays in modern society, and how that’s evolved over time.

If you liked watching All of You on streaming as much as I did, a desire to check out other movies in this genre could pop up. Thankfully, there are countless other movies that adopt a very similar, sentimental mode of storytelling for audiences to jump into after finishing All of You.

Love stories and sci-fi settings don’t always go hand-in-hand, but these movies do a fantastic job of blurring the line between genres.

Starman

Starman isn’t frequently mentioned among John Carpenter’s best movies, but the film has every right to be in the conversation. With its charming performances and colorful sci-fi aesthetic, Starman tells the story of an alien who comes to Earth and falls in love with a recently widowed woman looking for purpose in her life again.

While its synopsis may read as simplistic or clichéd, Starman is anything but. Carpenter’s screenplay utilizes this basic narrative to explore the human desire for love and companionship, reframing it as a universal constant that lends purpose to life. It’s a very sentimental story that has aged much better than most ’80s romance films.

Palm Springs

Palm Springs may not be as deeply moving and emotional as films like All of You, but they certainly share the same affinity for humor. Andy Siara’s screenplay is filled with subtle jokes and running gags, but everything serves the greater purpose of forging a tangible chemistry between these characters and making their relationship feel natural.

Palm Springs is a time-loop movie, meaning the two protagonists keep living the same day over and over again, each time attempting to break the cycle and go back to their normal lives. This is both a very reliable storytelling device and a very astute way of commenting on the frailty of life — we only have one go, and it’s that immutability that makes it so valuable.

Never Let Me Go

Alex Garland has become one of the leading voices in sci-fi filmmaking over the past few years, but his screenplay for Never Let Me Go is a lot more subtle and profound in its genre conventions. In fact, the film rarely feels like a sci-fi movie at all, but rather a deeply real and human one that simply explores what it means to be alive.

This is a trait it clearly shares with All of You. Both movies simply use their sci-fi concepts as stepping stones to tell a much more important and grounded story. Never Let Me Go is the story of three friends who grow up together and discover that nothing about their lives is as it seems when they enter the real world.

Little Fish

One of the most underrated movies of the 2020s so far, Little Fish is an emotional gut-punch that uses subtle sci-fi concepts to demonstrate just how painful and unfair the process of love can sometimes be. The story centers around a young couple whose relationship is torn apart by a new virus that causes people to lose their memories.

Little Fish‘s dreamlike visuals and non-linear storytelling give the film a very distinct and hazy atmosphere, using these characters’ failing memories to tell the story of their relationship from their own fractured perspective. It’s a narrative about how our memories define us, and how, without them, the world begins to look much darker.

Much like All of You, Little Fish is a movie that hinges entirely on its two lead performances. Olivia Cooke and Jack O’Connell have brilliant chemistry in this film, bouncing off each other effortlessly with dry humor and heartfelt interactions that feel incredibly natural despite the sci-fi setting.

The Lobster

Yorgos Lanthimos is a very unique filmmaker; his stories are typically built on the foundations of a bizarre idea, but quickly flourish into something very relatable and universal. That’s exactly what happens in The Lobster, a story about a dystopian H๏τel where single people are tasked with meeting their soulmate or being transformed into an animal of their choice.

The Lobster offers some very interesting commentary on how the modern world has turned the search for love into a kind of social pressure, using its story as a thinly veiled allegory for the artificial, manufactured nature of things like dating apps. All of You takes a similar approach, using the “test” as a metaphor for the way love has become a social commodity.

Her

Her is one of the defining romance movies of the 21st Century, taking a concept as universal as love and showing how it’s been distorted and diluted by the modern world we’re living in. The story centers around a lonely man named Theodore, who enters into a romantic relationship with an artificial intelligence after a particularly painful breakup.

What makes Her such a resounding success (despite its admittedly weird premise) is the film’s deep, intimate understanding of why human beings are drawn to love in the first place. It’s a story about the desire for companionship and how this becomes dangerous in a world that’s constantly trying to force artificial companionship upon the most vulnerable people.

About Time

Although their stories are very different, About Time and All of You are bound together by a very specific purpose. They’re both films that present audiences with a seemingly perfect “solution” to love, before deconstructing the problems with this idea and concluding that the only life worth living is one that we’re in control of.

In All of You, it’s the “test” that provides people with their perfect match, but leaves people pressured to stay in relationships that may not provide them with true happiness. In About Time, it’s the ability to travel through time and repeat certain moments over and over again until you get them right, but losing the true spark of life’s unpredictability in the process.

About Time has a reputation for making audiences cry, but it’s not just because the characters are sad; it’s because the film understands exactly how precious life is, and manages to present this to the audience in a way that feels totally genuine and authentic. We can’t “cheat” life with scientific tests or time-travel powers without losing its whole meaning in the process.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

For a long time now, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been the blueprint for how to blend science fiction with romance in a way that maintains the best aspects of both genres. It’s a film that values deep, human connection above all else, but is equally never afraid to get weird and quirky with its sci-fi rules.

The story centers around Joel and Clementine, a recently broken-up couple who decide to undergo medical treatment to remove each other from their memories. But when the time comes for Joel to undergo the procedure, he begins to realize that his love for Clementine still remains.

Eternal Sunshine is a beautiful, poignant story about embracing our pain and learning from it, rather than shutting it away and letting it eat us away from the inside. We may not be able to erase the bitter memories of things that ended painfully, but we can still be glad they happened in the first place.