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Movies that feel like American Graffiti (1973)

If you loved American Graffiti, the closest films we have are Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), Igby Goes Down (2002) and Harold and Maude (1971). All three share American Graffiti's witty and playful feel, which is what we rank on before quality. 4 of the 12 picks below are included with a subscription right now on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and MGM Plus and others, checked against today's data.

A couple of high school graduates spend one final night cruising the strip with their buddies before they go off to college.

🍅 95% Rotten Tomatoes7.4 IMDb ↗TMDB ↗dir. George Lucaswittyplayfulcontemplativeromantic
Stream it:Netflix
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If American Graffiti hit the spot, these will too

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham poster
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
2001 · dir. Karan Johar
🍅 100%7.4comedy · drama

Witty where it counts, playful underneath

The difference: 28 years apart, and the 2000s show

Years after his father disowns his adopted brother for marrying a woman of lower social standing, a young man goes on a mission to reunite his family.

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Igby Goes Down poster
Igby Goes Down
2002 · dir. Burr Steers
🍅 75%6.8comedy · drama

The same mix in both: stillness, then romance

Igby Slocumb, a rebellious and sarcastic 17-year-old boy, is at war with the stifling world of old money privilege he was born into. With a schizophrenic father, a self-absorbed, distant mother, and a shark-like young Republican big brother, Igby figures there must be a better life out there -- and sets about finding it.

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Harold and Maude poster
Harold and Maude
1971 · dir. Hal Ashby
🍅 86%7.8comedy · drama · romance

Both lean on wit more than on comedy

The difference: Leans harder into romance than American Graffiti does

A deadpan young man obsessed with death meets an eccentric septuagenarian who teaches him to live life to the fullest.

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Sissi poster
Sissi
1955 · dir. Ernst Marischka
7comedy · drama · romance

Both are built on the same subject: love at first sight

The young Bavarian princess Elisabeth, who all call Sissi, goes with her mother and older sister Néné to Austria where Néné will be wed to an emperor named Franz Joseph, Yet unexpectedly Franz runs into Sissi while out fishing and they fall in love.

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Two for the Road poster
Two for the Road
1967 · dir. Stanley Donen
🍅 82%7.4drama · romance · comedy

Playful drama in both cases

Architect Mark Wallace and his wife, Joanna, travel to France to meet with an affluent client. While there, they reflect on their first decade of marriage -- memories of when they first met, of courtship, and of road trips through the French countryside. As flirtation and playful quarreling turn to boredom with the banality of married life, the Wallaces struggle to rekindle their passion, while mutual infidelity threatens to tear them apart.

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Johnny Stecchino poster
Johnny Stecchino
1991 · dir. Roberto Benigni
🍅 46%7.2comedy

Comedy built on romance, twice over

The difference: Critics were much harder on this one

Good hearted but not very wordly-wise, Dante is happy driving the school bus for a group of mentally handicapped children, while feeling he is somehow missing out on life and love. So he is very excited when after nearly being knocked down by her car he meets Maria, who seems immediately enamoured of him. He is soon invited to her sumptuous Palermo villa, little suspecting that this is part of a plot. He bears an amazing likeness to Maria's stool-pigeon gangster husband and it would be convenient for them if the mobster, in the shape of Dante, was seen to be dead and buried.

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Same Time, Next Year poster
Same Time, Next Year
1978 · dir. Robert Mulligan
🍅 40%7.2comedy · drama · romance

Contemplative drama, and it commits to that

A man and woman meet by chance at a romantic inn over dinner and, although both are happily married to others, they find themselves in the same bed the next morning questioning how this could have happened. They agree to meet on the same weekend each year—in the same hotel room—and the years pass each has some personal crisis that the other helps them through, often without both of them understanding what is going on.

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Little White Lies poster
Little White Lies
2010 · dir. Guillaume Canet
🍅 41%7.1comedy · drama

Comedy with a pulse of wit, in both cases

Despite a traumatic event, a group of friends decide to go ahead with their annual beach vacation. Their relationships, convictions, sense of guilt and friendship are sorely tested. They are finally forced to own up to the little white lies they've been telling each other.

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The Farewell poster
The Farewell
2019 · dir. Lulu Wang
🍅 97%7.5comedy · drama

Drama built on play, twice over

A headstrong Chinese-American woman returns to China when her beloved grandmother is given a terminal diagnosis. Billi struggles with her family's decision to keep grandma in the dark about her own illness as they all stage an impromptu wedding to see grandma one last time.

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Being There poster
Being There
1979 · dir. Hal Ashby
🍅 95%7.9comedy · drama

Both work the same stillness

The difference: None of the romance American Graffiti is built on

A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television.

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My Favorite Year poster
My Favorite Year
1982 · dir. Richard Benjamin
🍅 97%7.3comedy · drama

Comedy in the same key

Fledgling comic Benjy Stone can't believe his luck when his childhood hero, the swashbuckling matinee idol Alan Swann, gets booked to appear on the variety show he writes for. But when Swann arrives, he fails to live up to his silver screen image. Instead, he's a drunken womanizer who suffers from stage fright. Benjy is assigned to look after him before the show, and it's all he can do to keep his former idol from going completely off the rails.

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Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears poster
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
1980 · dir. Vladimir Menshov
🍅 40%8drama · comedy · romance

The shared currency is romance

Living together in a workers' dorm, Katerina and her friends are determined to make it in Moscow. But when a boorish cameraman forces himself on her, Katerina finds herself pregnant and alone as her friends move on. Twenty years later, Katerina is a factory director, outpacing her old roommates career-wise, yet still alone but for her daughter. Love seems possible again when she meets a genial mechanic.

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The best-reviewed films that share American Graffiti’s defining feeling.