To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is the cutest movie of the year
All other movies are canceled.
Dear reader, if you are like me, you are probably tired of prestige content. People are practically stopping you in the streets to tell you to watch Sharp Objects, and you’re sick of it! You just want to watch something light and fun that will make you feel good. Friends, that something is here, it’s called To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, and it’s available on Netflix for your streaming pleasure.
Based on Jenny Han’s best-selling Y.A. novel, TATBILB is a deliriously cute movie about Lara Jean Covey, a high school junior who writes letters to her crushes without the intent of ever sending them. Obviously the letters get sent out, and Lara Jean ends up in a fake relationship with one of the recipients, Peter Kavinsky, so that her sister’s ex-boyfriend and fellow letter recipient, Josh Sanderson, won’t ask too many questions.
Like any good romantic comedy, the joy of the movie doesn’t stem from the will they or won’t they question. You know they will, but watching Lara Jean and Peter’s relationship go from a contract agreement to full-on making out in a hot tub is the kind of thing rom-com aficionados like myself live for. Think of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant running lines on the roof in Notting Hill, or Meg Ryan calling Billy Crystal after a break up in When Harry Met Sally, or Colin Firth saving Renee Zellweger’s dinner party in Bridget Jones’s Diary. I could do this all day. The path to a climactic kiss is just as good as the kiss itself, which is something TATBILB understands completely.
The other facet of the rom-com that TATBILB really gets is that these movies live and die by how cute their leads are. Lana Condor as Lara Jean is a goddamn delight. She’s witty and adorable, the kind of girl you either wish you were or thought you were in high school. Our other lead, Noah Centineo as Peter Kavinsky, is also charming and funny, with the additional bonus of being so hot that he could hit me with his car and I would say thank you. You may have seen his perfect face on your timeline in the past 48 hours, because it seems that it’s impossible to watch this movie without tweeting about how you’d let Centineo spit in your mouth. I would bet my savings account that one of the most popular Google searches of the past weekend was “Noah Centineo age,” which is what I did to make sure it was legal to want him to ruin my life. (It is, he’s 22.)
So give yourself a one-night break from watching people mine their past traumas, press play on To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, and email me to tell me your favorite Lara Jean/Peter moments. Mine is when they make each other their phone backgrounds. Peter splashing Lara Jean in the hot tub is a close second, and the other 90 minutes of the movie come in third.