Better Than the Movies

Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter is the 2021 first instalment in the Better Than the Movies duology, published by Simon & Schuster. The second book, Nothing Like the Movies, picks up the story in college. This opening novel follows Liz Buxbaum, a high school senior who has spent years curating internal soundtracks, staging imaginary meet-cutes, and filtering the world through the lens of classic romantic comedies - a habit inherited from her late mother, a screenwriter who watched films with Liz before she died. Romance, for Liz, isn't just escapism. It's a way of staying close to someone she lost too young.

When her childhood crush Michael moves back to town during the final weeks of senior year, Liz sees her chance at a real-life slow-burn romance. The problem is that landing Michael requires help from the last person she'd choose: Wes Bennett, her next-door neighbour and lifelong nemesis. Their ongoing war over a single parking spot has been running since childhood. He teases her relentlessly about her optimism and her movies. He is precisely the kind of person her mother warned her against. But Liz needs him, and Wes - for reasons of his own - agrees. The deal is struck, the parking spot is on the table, and what follows is an enemies to lovers dynamic that Painter handles with genuine comic precision. The witty banter and sharp dialogue between Liz and Wes is where the novel earns its reputation: quick, layered, and funnier than it has any right to be.

Beneath the contemporary romance surface, there's real emotional weight. Liz's grief over her mother shapes everything from her romantic ideals to the complicated feelings she has about her new stepmother, and Painter doesn't shy away from letting that grief sit alongside the comedy rather than resolving it too neatly. The question Liz is really asking - whether the version of love she's inherited from the movies is one she actually wants, or one she's afraid to let go of - gives the story more substance than its light, breezy tone initially suggests. Personal growth and coming of age threads run quietly through every chapter.

Structurally, the novel borrows the rhythms of the genre it's celebrating. Short chapters open with quotes from classic films, Liz's first-person voice is propulsive and self-aware, and Painter uses the grumpy-sunshine dynamic between Wes and Liz to keep the fake dating-adjacent arrangement generating friction at every turn. The found family elements - Liz gradually opening up to the people around her rather than the idealised version of connection she's been chasing - land with quiet effectiveness. It's a YA romance that respects its readers enough to give them something worth feeling.

Originally published in 2021, Better Than the Movies built a devoted readership before exploding further when its paperback edition arrived in 2022, accumulating hundreds of thousands of reader ratings. A Netflix film adaptation was announced in 2026. For anyone who has ever watched a romantic comedy and wondered why their own life doesn't have a better soundtrack, Liz Buxbaum might be the most relatable protagonist of the decade.