With less than two weeks left in the year, it’s a great time to look back at 2024 movies, and I want to talk about the state of the romance genre. I’m a hopeless romantic who always makes time to catch the latest love stories, from rom coms to emotional epics. This year, I caught just about every romance movie that came out, but I was surprised to realize that not a single one of my five favorites are typical movies from this genre.

Now, there are movies that didn’t make this list that I enjoyed that are more typical romance movies. The Idea Of You swept me away more than I realized it would, and I thought Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt offered up a classic Hollywood romance of sorts in The Fall Guy. I also thought a movie called Players was the best new rom-com for those with a Netflix subscription. But here are the romance movies that really blew me away this year:

Believe me, I did not expect to have a documentary among my favorite romance movies of the year, but Skywalkers: A Love Story is definitely an epic entry to the genre. Especially because it’s a true story.

What Skywalkers: A Love Story Is About: The movie follows two daredevil “rooftoppers,” who free climb massive skyscrapers in their spare time to take artistic and viral photos. After Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus find fame separately for risking their lives to scale some of the world’s tallest buildings, they start collaborating and fall in love in the process. The documentary tells their stories before following the couple as they plan to break into Malaysia’s Merdeka 118 for their most daring adventure yet.