The “romance” and “drama” genres are both particularly broad ones when it comes to movies, and that makes it hard to pin down a certain era when such movies were particularly popular or unpopular. It’s possible to point to the 1940s and 1950s as one when the film noir genre was all the rage, or the 1980s as a particularly good time for say slasher movies. But romantic dramas? They always have been – and always will be – hot property.

There are plenty from the 2000s that are popular, as a result, including critically acclaimed titles like In the Mood for Love (2000) and mass-appeal hits like The Notebook (2004). But numerous movies blending romance and drama all coming out during the same decade will lead to certain films getting overlooked and ultimately feeling underrated. The following movies demonstrate this well, and are all underrated romantic dramas that were first released between 2000 and 2009.

10)'I Am Love' (2009)

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Luca Guadagnino is a filmmaker who’s become closely tied to the coming-of-age genre, given two of his most prominent movies in recent years have combined coming-of-age stories, romance, and Timothée Chalamet: 2017’s Call Me By Your Name and 2022’s Bones and All. One of his earlier films, I Am Love, might lack a coming-of-age element and Timothée Chalamet, but it’s still very good and worth checking out for fans of the director’s more recent films.

I Am Love centers on an unfulfilled mother of three who strikes up a potential romance with a much younger man, inevitably having to choose between having an affair or staying in the lane she’s always been in. That description might make I Am Love sound generic, but it’s a good deal artsier and nuanced than the premise might make it sound, and it’s an overall strong and effectively moving romance film.

9)'Ritual' (2000)

Director: Hideaki Anno

Ritual is a complete change of pace for Hideaki Anno, at least compared to the sorts of works he’s best known for. Between creating a masterful and unsettling existentialist anime series and co-directing Shin Godzilla, Anno also wrote and directed Ritual, which is a quiet and hypnotic movie about two lost souls meeting each other one day and trying to connect in their own strange ways.

There’s a strangely vacant feeling to much of Ritual, almost – but not quite – feeling slightly post-apocalyptic at times, even, with an intensely personal focus on just two main characters and the strange love story they find themselves wrapped up in. It’s a powerful film about loneliness and trying to find someone to share a life with, and is one film that ends up being offbeat and bold in all the right ways.

8)'Trouble Every Day' (2001)

Director: Claire Denis

Admittedly, Trouble Every Day isn’t explicitly a romantic drama movie, as it’s also a rather surprising horror movie, and an explicit one at that. To put things as simply and as mildly as possible, Trouble Every Day is about the “all-consuming” nature of love, focusing on two young Americans who are on honeymoon in Paris, and begin to learn certain unpleasant truths about themselves and each other.

It’s certainly not a movie for the faint of heart, and beyond having some graphic scenes, there’s also just a very dark and unsettling feeling to everything, meaning it’s both visually unpleasant and psychologically shattering. Maybe it’s okay that a fairly extreme film like Trouble Every Day can’t be described as hugely popular, but those who don’t mind their films going to some out-there and alarming places might well find it worth checking out (bring a barf bag).

7)'Syndromes and a Century' (2006)

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a filmmaker who specializes in making some very distinctive arthouse films, with Syndromes and a Century perhaps being his most digestible to date. It’s still quite obscure for large chunks of its runtime, but it doesn’t take as many perplexing tangents as some of his other films, and mostly centers on two doctors who are loosely based on Weerasethakul’s own parents.

As an arthouse film, Syndromes and a Century is hard to categorize into specific genres, but at least part of it revolves around the relationship between the two main characters, and much of the rest of the movie seems to be about everyday goings-on at a medical center. It’s slow and not exactly filled with high-stakes things happening non-stop, but there’s a certain feel to it that’s unique, and watching it can prove to be something of a hypnotic experience.

6)'Somersault' (2004)

Director: Cate Shortland

An underrated Australian Film that's a very effective blend of romance and drama, Somersault deals with the ups and downs in the life of a teenage girl after she’s forced to leave home suddenly. This leads her on a journey of self-discovery and eventually into a relationship with some stability, though challenges arise when she finds herself having to start “adulting” (to use some dreaded Millennial slang) earlier than most people have to.

Somersault is a film about how people can’t always choose at what point they “grow up,” exploring the difficulties that can come about from settling down and trying to make it on one’s own when one's still relatively young. It’s grounded and very authentic – perhaps sometimes uncomfortably so – and is also noteworthy for marking early roles for both Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington, both of whom became better known in the years that followed Somersault’s release.

5)'Millennium Mambo' (2001)

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien

Millennium Mambo is another 2000s romance/drama film that can count itself as belonging to the arthouse genre. It’s hard to get much by way of narrative out of this film, but that in no way feels detrimental to the experience of watching it. Broadly, it seems to be about one person looking back on a tumultuous relationship they had at the start of the 2000s, and remembering parts of it in fragments.

It's a movie that feels like it’s about nostalgia, loneliness, and belonging, but it’s also impressionistic enough that different viewers are bound to come away thinking about – and feeling – any number of things. Millennium Mambo is the sort of film to watch and let it wash over you; it’s easy to sink into, and it undoubtedly looks and sounds stunning, from front to back, too.

4)'Away from Her' (2006)

Director: Sarah Polley

A superbly acted and underrated film, Away from Her is sort of a romance, but it’s also a brutally honest movie about how it feels to get old and how someone’s memory slipping away affects the individual and those who know them. It’s about a woman with Alzheimer’s, and the way that she begins to drift away from her husband of 50 years after entering a nursing home, seeming drawn to another man who resides there.

Away from Her is a fairly slow film, but that doesn’t mean it’s one that could be called boring, as it’s always controlled, going somewhere, and feels empathetic and powerfully acted all around. It’s not a good romance film if one wants to feel good, necessarily, but those after something thoughtful and suitably dramatic (perhaps more so than romantic) might get something out of this.

3)'The Hidden Blade' (2004)

Director: Yoji Yamada

Ranking among the most underrated samurai movies of all time, The Hidden Blade is the second film in a loosely thematic trilogy directed by Yoji Yamada (films 1 and 3 being The Twilight Samurai and Love and Honor, respectively). The Hidden Blade de-emphasizes large and/or flashy action scenes, compared to most samurai movies, however, and is just as keen to focus on a love story as it is the more central narrative focusing on one samurai being tasked with finding and killing an old friend.

It's a film that takes its time, but uses its pacing to gradually build tension regarding the main plot, and develop the characters who are central to the whole romance angle of the movie. The Hidden Blade might not sound terribly exciting on paper, but it comes together amazingly well in execution, and will reward patient viewers willing to give it a shot.

2)'Head-On' (2004)

Director: Fatih Akin

Head-On has a somewhat disquieting premise, and then proves itself willing to become more and more intense – as far as romance movies go – as it progresses. The two people at the center of the narrative are a troubled young woman and an also troubled man who’s numerous years older than her, with the former getting married to the latter so she can escape her suffocating family life.

So begins a rather rocky and raw story, ensuring Head-On is a powerful watch, sure, but one that’s probably best not saved for date night or anything genuinely romantic like that. Still, romance movies don’t have to be sunshine and rainbows all the time to be good, especially when focusing on romance movies that also function as dramas… and Head-On, as far as dramas go, is undeniably hard-hitting.

1)'Tropical Malady' (2004)

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

One more Apichatpong Weerasethakul film worth mentioning when it comes to the subject of underrated romance/drama movies from the 2000s is Tropical Malady, which certainly ranks as one of the unique filmmaker’s best works. It’s something of a fantasy movie alongside being a quiet romance, focusing on a bond that forms between two men in the first half, and then becoming something stranger and darker altogether in the second half.

The first hour of Tropical Malady is pretty easy to digest, with the second hour being a great deal more unusual, and more thematically linked to the first hour – in some ways – more than being a continuation of any plot threads. Still, one doesn’t enter into a Weerasethakul looking for a narrative, but anyone who wants a unique and subtly captivating blend of romance, fantasy, and drama genres will likely find just that within Tropical Malady and all its mysteries.