5 Best New Year's Eve Movies To Watch Before We Ring In 2026

2025 is almost over, and honestly? This year was a doozy. Also, as a holiday, let's be frank about New Year's Eve: It's one of the most over-hyped nights of the year. You can, if you want, go out that night and blow a bunch of money on champagne and Uber rides ... or, if you want, you can put together a cozy movie marathon with these five picks.

Realistically, the movies I've assembled here can be watched on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, or you can start on Eve and wrap it all up throughout Day. Whatever floats your boat. So why these movies? First, there has to be a crucial scene in the narrative that takes place on New Year's Eve, which you'll notice applies to all five of these films. Second, they have to be good, which is why the aptly named 2011 ensemble rom-com "New Year's Eve" is not included on this list despite its ostensibly appropriate title. Third, all of these movies feel like they could be re-watched annually if you wanted to start a tradition of some kind. Without further ado, here are five movies perfect for ringing in 2026.

If you've never seen writer-director Billy Wilder's masterful romantic comedy "The Apartment," there's no better time for your first-ever viewing than New Year's Eve. One of the greatest movies ever made and the winner of Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay at the 33rd annual Academy Awards, "The Apartment," which Wilder co-wrote with I. A. L. Diamond, introduces us to lowly insurance man C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who spends his time trying to curry favor with his superiors by lending them his beautiful Upper West Side apartment. Why? So they can cheat on their wives in peace. (Honestly, the conceit of this movie is incredible and feels like the kind of thing you actually "couldn't make today.")

Things get considerably more complicated when Bud takes an interest in his building's elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), only to discover that she's having an affair with his company's personnel director, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) ... and as it happens, Sheldrake has arranged to use Bud's apartment to do the very deed. So what does all of this have to do with New Year's Eve? Well, the conclusion of the story — where, as you can imagine, Fran and Bud find their way together and Sheldrake gets his richly deserved comeuppance — happens at a New Year's Eve party, letting all of its protagonists start fresh with a new year. "The Apartment" is a true American classic, and it's a perfect New Year's film.

I personally watch "When Harry Met Sally..." every single year on New Year's Day, and I cannot recommend this tradition highly enough. Set across twelve years, Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron's beloved romantic comedy shows us the genesis of the bond between Harry Burns and Sally Albright, played winningly by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, starting with a pretty miserable drive from Chicago to New York after they both graduate from college. Despite not hitting it off at first and despite Harry's insistence that men and women can't be friends "because the sex thing gets in the way," Harry and Sally do become best friends as adults living in New York, and from that point on, the film follows their journey from friends to soulmates.

"When Harry Met Sally..." is about as close to perfect as a movie can get, in my humble opinion. You've got a phenomenal script from Ephron, careful and thoughtful direction from Reiner, Crystal and Ryan at their best, and major supporting players Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby also turning in outstanding performances as Marie and Jess, Sally and Harry's best friends who end up falling for one another to boot. The big final scene of "When Harry Met Sally..." where Harry finally professes his love for Sally after over a decade and a misguided hookup takes place during a New Year's Eve party, making it the perfect watch for this holiday. Plus, there's no better way to pay your respects to the late, great Reiner, who was killed alongside his wife Michele in December of 2025.

We've all made hopelessly unachievable New Year's resolutions before, and in that way, I think we can all relate to Renée Zellweger's titular heroine in "Bridget Jones's Diary." Based on the best-selling novel by Helen Fielding and adapted for the big screen by Fielding, Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, and director Sharon Maguire, "Bridget Jones's Diary" opens not on New Year's Eve, but New Year's Day as our disheveled heroine heads to her mother Pamela's (Gemma Jones) house for her annual "turkey curry buffet." There, a hungover Bridget meets the standoffish Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who insults her sweater and general demeanor pretty much immediately — to say the two don't like each other at first is a massive understatement.

Undaunted, Bridget goes home and makes several New Year's resolutions about avoiding bad men, quitting smoking, and cutting back on drinking — none of which, to be fair, she accomplishes at all, especially when it comes to bad men like her boss Daniel Cleaver (a delightfully smug Hugh Grant). Because this whole thing is a modern take on Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice," which you might have gleaned from Mark's last name, you probably know that Bridget and Mark are destined to come together at the end, and they do just before the new year, with Mark buying Bridget a new diary to commemorate a fresh start. That he does so while Bridget is chasing him down a snowy London street in her underwear is just the cherry on top. There are three sequels to "Bridget Jones's Diary" and mileage does vary with those, but the original is still perfect, and it's especially perfect for New Year's Eve.

Okay, hear me out: Yes, Coralie Fargeat's Oscar-nominated body horror film about how we view aging women in society is undeniably gross, and if you're at all squeamish, you might want to reconsider adding this to your marathon. If you can stomach "The Substance," though, the film, which stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, richly rewards you and builds up to a truly bonkers, unforgettable ending that'll leave your jaw on the floor. As "The Substance" begins, we meet Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a fading star who gets fired from her fitness series for being an older woman. Desperate to maintain any semblance of youth, she makes an arrangement with shadowy and mysterious figures to take the titular substance, which allows her to enter the body of a young and beautiful woman named Sue (Qualley) for one week at a time. Even though Elisabeth is expressly told that she must "respect the balance" and switch back and forth between her body and Sue's every single week, she loves living as Sue too much, whether she's meeting handsome men or getting a job running her former fitness series.

What this means is that, after prolonged periods of refusing to respect the balance, Elisabeth and Sue merge into a horrifying creature only referred to as Monstro Elisasue right before she's supposed to, as Sue, host a New Year's Eve broadcast. I won't spoil precisely how Monstro Elisasue ruins that broadcast in a big way — it's best to experience it for yourself — but if you want to ring in the new year with a blast, so to speak, queue up "The Substance."

In the first scene of Richard Curtis' heartfelt love story "About Time," Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) is feeling like a huge loser after a disastrous New Year's Eve party when his father James (a toned-down and spectacular Bill Nighy) gives him some genuinely shocking news: All the men in the Lake family can travel through time. But the whole situation is lower stakes than you might imagine, since they can only travel to moments they experienced in their own lives, and there's some pretty complicated factors about traveling through time after a new baby is born (in that the baby can change, and yes, this is relevant to the movie's plot at a certain point). To test this out, a very dubious Tim goes into a dark space and clenches his fists as instructed and is absolutely flabbergasted when, just as James promised, he's transported back to the beginning of that awful New Year's Eve party; from that point on, Tim decides to use this family gift to find love.

After striking out with Margot Robbie's Charlotte thanks to constant timing problems, Tim unexpectedly meets an American publishing executive named Mary (an absolutely charming Rachel McAdams), and, using his time-travel ability, Tim basically creates the perfect relationship for the two of them. Not only is "About Time" a movie with a focus on New Year's, but at the end of the day, what Tim discovers is that his power gives him the ability to appreciate the passage of time even more. What better message could you carry into a new year? "About Time" is one of the most earnest and sweet movies made in recent decades, and it'll start 2026 off in the perfect way. (Sadly, though, you will not gain any time-travel abilities after watching this film.)