BingeBox: romances and comedies for a cosy evening, from Enchanted April, A Little Romance and Cold Comfort Farm to The Girl in the Café, Love Sarah and All of My Heart, and where to watch them

How the collection is arranged

BingeBox is black from edge to edge. A frosted bar floats at the top of the page with the logo, the menu, a rounded search field and an indigo My List button. Beneath it the home page opens with a very tall film still; a row of small rounded labels gives the year, the score and the kind of film, the title is set large, a few lines tell the story, and two rounded buttons open the film or the whole catalogue. The rows follow, each under a small white heading with a View all link at its right: Trending This Week, Popular Romances, Top Rated Movies, Made for Television, Weddings and Royals, and Kitchens and Cafés. The posters have deeply rounded corners, and the title, the year and the score sit under each.

The lists are the main way through the catalogue. Romance, Comedy, Drama and Family sort the films by kind, and Made for television gathers the ninety that were first shown on the small screen. Five lists sort them by subject: Weddings and royals, Kitchens and cafés, The four seasons, Small towns and Music. Classics holds everything made before 2000, four lists divide the later films by year, and Top rated has the forty-four with the strongest scores.

The page for each film is arranged in a fixed order, so that it soon becomes familiar. First come the poster and the title with its labels: the year, the running time, the kinds of story and the score. A paragraph tells what the film is about, and the director and leading actors are listed below it. The Watch now button follows, beside a menu of countries; BingeBox keeps your choice of country for next time, and the button opens the JustWatch page that shows which services offer the film there to stream, rent or buy.

The classics

Thirty-seven films were made before 2000, and they are the backbone of the catalogue. Enchanted April (1991), directed by Mike Newell from the novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, begins on a wet February day in London in the 1920s. Lottie Wilkins sees an advertisement in a newspaper, addressed to those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine, for a small medieval castle on the Italian coast to be let for the month of April. She persuades a woman from her club, Rose Arbuthnot, to share it, and they find two more to help with the rent: a fashionable beauty who is tired of being admired, and a formidable widow who knew the great Victorians. The castle and its gardens do the rest. Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker and Joan Plowright play the four, and the film leaves its audience feeling that they too have had a month in the sun.

A Little Romance (1979), directed by George Roy Hill, was the first film of Diane Lane, who was thirteen. She plays Lauren, a clever American girl living in Paris, who meets Daniel, a French boy who loves the cinema. An elderly gentleman, played by Laurence Olivier, tells them a legend: that two lovers who kiss in a gondola under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice at sunset, as the bells ring, will love each other for ever. The three of them set off to try it. The music by Georges Delerue won an Academy Award, and the film remains one of the most charming ever made about first love.

Cold Comfort Farm (1995), directed by John Schlesinger for British television from the comic novel by Stella Gibbons, sends Flora Poste, a brisk young woman of the 1930s with a small income and a taste for tidiness, to live with her relations on a gloomy farm in Sussex. The Starkadders are a family from the darkest kind of rural fiction: a preacher, a brooding son, a grandmother who once saw something nasty in the woodshed and has kept to her room ever since. Flora sets about improving them one by one. Kate Beckinsale leads a cast that includes Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell, Joanna Lumley and Stephen Fry.

American comedy of the 1970s and 1980s is well represented. Butterflies Are Free (1972) stars Goldie Hawn as the free-spirited neighbour of a young blind man who has just moved into his first flat, and Eileen Heckart, who won an Academy Award, as his anxious mother. Harry and Tonto (1974) follows a retired teacher who loses his New York apartment and crosses America with his cat; Art Carney won the Academy Award for best actor. Starting Over (1979) is a comedy of divorce and second chances with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh, The Four Seasons (1981), written and directed by Alan Alda, follows three couples through a year of shared holidays, and Murphy's Romance (1985) brings a divorced mother, played by Sally Field, to a small Arizona town where the pharmacist, played by James Garner, takes an interest.

From Australia comes My Brilliant Career (1979), directed by Gillian Armstrong from the novel by Miles Franklin: Sybylla, a headstrong girl in the bush of the 1890s, is determined to be a writer and has to decide what to do about a proposal from a man she likes very much. It made stars of Judy Davis and Sam Neill. Davis appears again in Impromptu (1991) as the novelist George Sand, in pursuit of a delicate young composer named Chopin, played by Hugh Grant. Ice Castles (1978) is the story of a young figure skater from Iowa and the boy who helps her back onto the ice after an accident, and Funny Lady (1975) continues the life of the entertainer Fanny Brice, with Barbra Streisand.

The 1990s add Mother (1996), in which a twice-divorced writer, played by Albert Brooks, moves back into his old bedroom to work out where his troubles began, with Debbie Reynolds as his unflappable mother; Angus (1995), a warm comedy about a boy who is elected, as a joke, to dance with the most popular girl in school; Soul Food (1997), about three sisters in Chicago and the Sunday dinners that hold their family together; Speechless (1994), Born Yesterday (1993), Straight Talk (1992), with Dolly Parton as an accidental radio adviser, and Next Stop Wonderland (1998), a romance set on the Boston underground.

From the bookshelf

A good number of the films come from novels and plays, and they make a pleasant course of reading in themselves. Jane Eyre (1997) is a television version of Charlotte Brontë's novel with Samantha Morton as the governess and Ciarán Hinds as Mr Rochester; it is brisk, faithful and well acted. I Capture the Castle (2003), from the novel by Dodie Smith, is narrated by Cassandra Mortmain, who is seventeen and lives with her eccentric family in a crumbling castle in Suffolk in the 1930s; her father wrote one famous book long ago and has been silent since, and the arrival of two American brothers changes everything. Romola Garai plays Cassandra, with Rose Byrne as her sister and Bill Nighy as the father.

Shakespeare's comedies are here in three films. Twelfth Night (1996), directed by Trevor Nunn, sets the play in a nineteenth-century country house by the sea, with Imogen Stubbs as Viola, Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia and Ben Kingsley as the fool. As You Like It (2006), directed by Kenneth Branagh, moves the Forest of Arden to Japan, and his Love's Labour's Lost (2000) turns the play into a musical of the 1930s, with songs by Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. The Boy Friend (1971), directed by Ken Russell and starring Twiggy, is a musical about a provincial theatre company putting on a musical, and is the oldest film in the catalogue.

The Last Dragonslayer (2016), from the novel by Jasper Fforde, is a fantasy for the family about an orphan who learns that she is to face the last dragon in a kingdom where magic is fading. Hollywood Stargirl (2022) continues a much-loved story for young readers, and 13: The Musical (2022) is from a Broadway show about a boy who moves from New York to a small town in Indiana just before his thirteenth birthday. The Wiz Live! (2015) is a television staging of the celebrated musical version of The Wizard of Oz.

The television romance

Half of the catalogue was made for television, most of it for the American channels that have specialised in romance since the 2000s. These films are made quickly and in great numbers, and they keep to rules that their audience knows by heart. The heroine has a job she is good at, in a city, and something calls her away from it: an inheritance, a family business in difficulty, a wedding. In the smaller place she meets a man who irritates her on sight. A festival, a competition or a deadline throws them together; a misunderstanding parts them ten minutes from the end; and the last scene brings a kiss, usually out of doors. The pleasure lies in the variations, and in the settings, which are chosen to be places anyone would like to spend a weekend.

All of My Heart (2015) shows the form at its best. Jenny, a caterer played by Lacey Chabert, inherits half of a country house; the other half goes to Brian, a Wall Street trader played by Brennan Elliott, who wants to sell it. They agree to do it up together, with the help of a plumber, a goat and the neighbours, and the house wins. The film was so well liked that it has two sequels here, All of My Heart: Inn Love (2017), in which the pair open the house as an inn, and All of My Heart: The Wedding (2018). Chabert, the most familiar face of the form, also stars in Love, Romance & Chocolate (2019), set in Bruges, and in The Wedding Veil (2022), about three friends who buy an antique veil said to bring love to whoever owns it.

Inheritances and family businesses supply many of the plots. In Sweet Autumn (2020) a woman comes home for the reading of a will and finds she has been left half of her aunt's sweet shop. In Love on Harbor Island (2020) an interior designer returns to help her aunt run a guest house by a marina, in Sand Dollar Cove (2021) a property manager is sent to buy a stretch of the Connecticut shore and loses her heart to the pier, and in Love, Fall & Order (2019) a lawyer goes home to save her father's pumpkin farm. Love Finds You in Valentine (2016) takes its heroine to a ranch in Nebraska, Under the Autumn Moon (2018) to a guest ranch, Big Sky River (2022) to Montana and Falling for Vermont (2017) to New England in the season of the leaves.

Others turn on a pretence. A Royal Runaway Romance (2022) follows a princess who drives across America with her bodyguard to see an artist she believes she loves. Once Upon a Prince (2018) and A Prince in Paradise (2023) introduce heirs to small European thrones who are taken for ordinary men, and The Prince & Me 4: The Elephant Adventure (2010) continues a popular series about a student from Wisconsin who married a king. Midnight Masquerade (2014) reverses the story of Cinderella, with a young businesswoman as the prince and a clerk in her lawyers' office as the one who leaves a ball in a hurry.

Weddings

Thirty-seven films turn on a wedding or a proposal, which is hardly surprising in a library of romances. A Country Wedding (2015) is one of the favourites. A famous country singer, about to marry a film star, goes back to the small Texas town where he grew up to sell the family house, and meets the girl next door, who now runs a ranch for rescued horses and has kept his secrets since they were children. My Favorite Wedding (2017) follows a young doctor who takes over the planning of her best friend's wedding with clinical efficiency, Sister of the Bride (2019) concerns an engagement that the bride's father thinks too hasty, and Bridal Wave (2015) a bride who begins to have doubts at an island resort.

Yes, I Do (2018) is about a chocolate maker who has left the same patient man at the altar three times, Nearlyweds (2013) about three friends who discover after their honeymoons that their marriages were left unregistered, and I Do, I Do, I Do (2015) about a bride who finds herself living her wedding day again and again. A Harvest Wedding (2017), Sisters of the Groom (2017), Her Pen Pal (2021), set in Paris, Betting on the Bride (2017) and Ms. Matched (2016), in which a planner of lavish weddings meets an adviser on economical ones, are of the same family.

The cinema has its weddings too. Ali's Wedding (2017), from Australia, is based on the life of its writer and star, Osamah Sami, the son of a Muslim cleric in Melbourne, who told one small untruth about his examination results and found it growing into an engagement; it is a generous, very funny film about a community seldom seen on screen. The Wilde Wedding (2017) gathers the former husbands and many children of a retired actress, played by Glenn Close, for her fourth marriage, and Love, Weddings & Other Disasters (2020) follows the people who work behind the scenes, with Diane Keaton and Jeremy Irons.

Kitchens, bakeries and cafés

Food is the second great subject of the catalogue, and twenty-six films are set in a kitchen, a bakery, a vineyard or a café. Love Sarah (2020) is the best of them. Sarah was to open a bakery in Notting Hill with her closest friend, and after her death her daughter, her mother and the friend decide to open it for her. The three women hardly know each other, the shop is in the wrong street, and the cakes that finally save it are the ones that customers from every part of London remember from home. Celia Imrie plays the grandmother. Today's Special (2009) is a comedy about a young chef in New York who has to take over his father's Indian restaurant in Queens and learns to cook by feel from a taxi driver with a past in the great kitchens of Bombay.

The television romances are particularly fond of pastry. The Baker's Son (2021) is set on an island where the bread turns out well only when the baker is in love. Love, Romance & Chocolate sends an American accountant to Belgium at the time of a royal chocolate competition, A Dash of Love (2017) and Just Add Romance (2019) are set among cooks in competition, Love on the Menu (2019) pairs a chef with an executive from a frozen-food company, and You're Bacon Me Crazy (2020) sets two food trucks side by side at a festival in Portland. Farm to Fork to Love (2021), Love by Chance (2016), Coffee Shop (2014) and Autumn in the Vineyard (2016), in which two rivals each claim the same farm in the wine country of California, complete the menu.

Love's Kitchen (2011) is a British comedy about a London chef who takes over a country pub, and Eddie's Million Dollar Cook Off (2003) is a film for children about a boy who is the star of his baseball team and would rather be at the stove. Soul Food belongs here as well, for the Sunday table of its title, and so does The Trip to Spain (2017), in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing versions of themselves, drive from Santander to Málaga eating six fine lunches and competing in impressions of famous actors all the way.

The four seasons

Television romances are made for particular times of year, and twenty-nine films here announce their season in the title or the first scene. Autumn has the most: Sweet Autumn, Under the Autumn Moon, Love, Fall & Order, October Kiss (2015), in which a young woman who drifts from job to job becomes nanny to two children in the weeks before Halloween, A Harvest Wedding, Autumn in the Vineyard and Turkey Drop (2019), a comedy of a student's first visit home at Thanksgiving.

Winter brings Winter Castle (2019), set at a wedding in a hotel made of ice, Frozen in Love (2018), in which a bookshop owner and an ice hockey player are asked to improve each other's public image, Love on the Slopes (2018), Love in Winterland (2020) and Fall Into Winter (2023). February has its own small shelf: All Things Valentine (2016), A Valentine's Match (2020) and Love at First Glance (2017). Spring is the season of Home by Spring (2018) and of Enchanted April, and summer of Summer in the City (2016) and Love in the Sun (2019). The Four Seasons takes its three couples through all of them in turn, to the music of Vivaldi.

Britain and Ireland

British film and television contribute some of the most distinctive titles in the catalogue. The Girl in the Café (2005), written by Richard Curtis, stars Bill Nighy as Lawrence, a civil servant so shy that he can hardly finish a sentence, who shares a table in a crowded café with a young woman named Gina, played by Kelly Macdonald, and on an impulse invites her to accompany him to a summit of world leaders in Iceland. It is a love story and a film with something to say, and both actors are perfect. Marvellous (2014) tells the true story of Neil Baldwin of Staffordshire, who was told as a child that there were things he would be unable to do and went on to be a circus clown, a friend of bishops and the kit man of a famous football club; Toby Jones plays him, and the real Baldwin appears beside him.

Adult Life Skills (2016) stars Jodie Whittaker as a woman nearing thirty who lives in a shed at the bottom of her mother's garden in Yorkshire, making small films with her thumbs, and has to be coaxed back into the world. SuperBob (2015) is a comedy about the world's only superhero, a mild civil servant from south London, on his one day off. Falling for Figaro (2021) follows a successful fund manager who gives up her career to train as an opera singer with a fearsome teacher in the Scottish Highlands, played by Joanna Lumley. This Time Next Year (2024) is a romance between two Londoners born a minute apart on the same New Year's Day, and You Instead (2011) was filmed in a few days at a real music festival in Scotland, with its two leads handcuffed together.

Ireland appears in two of the television romances, As Luck Would Have It (2021), set at a matchmaking festival, and Forever in My Heart (2019), about a woman who returns to the inn where she once worked. Danny Deckchair (2003) and Spin Out (2016) are Australian comedies, the first about a labourer who ties helium balloons to a garden chair and floats away from Sydney to a small town that takes him for someone remarkable, the second set at a country gathering of pick-up trucks. Griff the Invisible (2011) is a gentle Australian romance about a shy office worker who believes he is a superhero and the young woman who believes him.

Music and dance

Thirty-one films are built around music. 'Round Midnight (1986), directed by Bertrand Tavernier, is set in Paris in 1959, where an ageing American saxophonist is looked after by a young Frenchman who loves his music; the part is played by the great tenor player Dexter Gordon, and Herbie Hancock won an Academy Award for the score. Pure Country (1992) stars the singer George Strait as a country star who walks off the stage in the middle of a tour, shaves off his beard and goes home to Texas to remember why he began. Sylvie's Love (2020) is a romance of Harlem in 1957, between a young woman who works in her father's record shop and dreams of television and a saxophonist on the edge of a career; it is filmed in the glowing colours of the melodramas of its period. The Jazz Singer (1980), with Neil Diamond and Laurence Olivier, tells of a cantor's son who wants to sing popular songs.

Bootmen (2000) is the story of a steelworker in an Australian industrial town who forms a troupe of tap dancers in work boots; it is based on the early life of its director, Dein Perry. Honey: Rise Up and Dance (2018) follows a street dancer in Atlanta, Gotta Kick It Up! (2002) a school dance team and its reluctant coach, and All Stars (2013) two children in London who stage a show to save their youth club. Valley Girl (2020) retells a romance of the 1980s as a musical with the pop songs of the time, Back to the Beach (1987) is an affectionate send-up of the surf films of the 1960s, and I Am Woman (2020) tells the life of the Australian singer Helen Reddy.

The cinema of the concert hall is represented by Coda (2020), with Patrick Stewart as a celebrated pianist troubled by stage fright late in his career, and by Eddie and the Cruisers (1983), in which a reporter goes looking for the lost recordings of a rock group of the 1960s. Listen to Your Heart (2010) is a love story between a songwriter and a young woman who has been unable to hear since childhood, and Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025) reunites a famously unlucky rock group for one last concert.

Why these films comfort

It is easy to smile at the television romance, and its admirers smile at it themselves. But the form has virtues that more ambitious films often lack. It is courteous: the characters speak kindly to each other, quarrels are mended with an apology, and the rival for the heroine's affection is usually a decent person who is simply wrong for her. It is interested in work, and takes baking, bookselling, farming and the running of an inn as seriously as other films take police work. And it is hopeful about places, showing towns where neighbours know one another and a festival can still fill the main street.

The older films on BingeBox share those qualities, which is why they sit so comfortably beside the new ones. Enchanted April is about four people who become kinder in the sun. Murphy's Romance is about patience, and Harry and Tonto about meeting each new stage of life with curiosity. The Girl in the Café believes that a shy man can do something brave, and Marvellous that cheerfulness is a kind of genius. A viewer who comes for the autumn leaves of Sweet Autumn may well stay for Cold Comfort Farm, and the reverse is just as likely.

Length and pace

Films made for television keep to a regular length. Almost all of the romances here run for between eighty and ninety minutes, built in sections that once fitted around advertisements, so that a small turn in the story arrives every ten or twelve minutes. That makes them easy to watch in an evening with interruptions, and easy to pause. The cinema films vary more: The Trip to Spain and Twelfth Night run to about two hours, Too Big to Fail and Iron Jawed Angels a little less, and Funny Lady rather more. The running time is shown among the labels at the top of every film page, beside the year.

Pace varies too. The comedies of the 1970s, Butterflies Are Free and Starting Over among them, take their time over conversation in a way that newer films seldom do, and reward a viewer who settles in. The British literary films move briskly through a great deal of plot. And the television romances are the most predictable of all in their rhythm, which is part of what their audience likes: the pleasure is in the company and the setting, and the story can be trusted to look after itself.

Sequels and series are worth a note. The three films about the country inn should be seen in order, All of My Heart, then All of My Heart: Inn Love, then All of My Heart: The Wedding, since each begins where the last ended. The Wedding Veil is the first of a set that follows three friends in turn. Every other film in the catalogue stands alone, including To Sir, with Love II and The Prince & Me 4: The Elephant Adventure, which explain their own background in the first few minutes.

Family films

Sixty-six films turn on a family, and a good many are made for children and their parents to watch together. Angus is the best of the school comedies: Angus is large, clever, good at science and football, and the favourite target of the most popular boy in his year, who arranges for him to be voted king of the winter dance as a joke. With the help of his grandfather, played by George C. Scott, and his mother, played by Kathy Bates, he decides to turn up. Little Secrets (2002) is about a girl of fourteen, a gifted violinist, who spends her summer keeping the secrets of the younger children in her street for fifty cents each, and has one of her own.

Chang Can Dunk (2023) follows a boy of sixteen who bets the star of his school's basketball team that he will be able to dunk the ball by the autumn, and trains all summer to do it. The Gabby Douglas Story (2014) tells how a girl from Virginia left home at fourteen to train in Iowa and became the Olympic all-around champion in gymnastics in 2012. Miracle Run (2004) is the true story of a mother who fought for the schooling of her twin sons, both diagnosed with autism, one of whom became a cross-country runner and the other a guitarist. A Mermaid's Tale (2017) and Sabrina, Down Under (1999) are light fantasies for younger viewers, and Eddie's Million Dollar Cook Off and Gotta Kick It Up! are comedies from a children's channel.

Several films are about grown children and their parents. Sam & Kate (2022) has an unusual cast: Dustin Hoffman and Sissy Spacek play a father and a mother in a small town, and their real son and daughter, Jake Hoffman and Schuyler Fisk, play the younger pair who fall for each other. The Tomorrow Man (2019) stars John Lithgow and Blythe Danner as two people in late middle age, one who stores supplies for every emergency and one who keeps everything she has ever owned. Darling Companion (2012) sends Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline into the Rocky Mountains in search of a lost dog, and Love, Classified (2022) is about a novelist who comes home to her grown son and daughter after years away.

To Sir, with Love II (1996) brought Sidney Poitier back, nearly thirty years after a famous film, to the part of a teacher who retires from a London school and takes one more class, in Chicago. Linoleum (2023) is a curious and touching film with Jim Gaffigan as the presenter of a children's science programme who decides to build a rocket in his garage, and Unleashed (2017) is a comedy in which a woman's cat and dog are turned, for a while, into two young men with exactly the characters one would expect.

True stories

A handful of films in the catalogue are drawn from real events. Iron Jawed Angels (2004) tells how a group of young American women, led by Alice Paul, campaigned for the vote in the years before 1920; Hilary Swank, Frances O'Connor and Anjelica Huston lead the cast. Too Big to Fail (2011) recreates the weeks of the financial crisis of 2008 inside the offices of the American treasury, with William Hurt, and is clearer about what happened than most histories. Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game (2023) is a comedy about Roger Sharpe, a young magazine writer who in 1976 demonstrated to the city council of New York that pinball was a game of skill.

Marvellous, The Gabby Douglas Story, Miracle Run, Ali's Wedding and I Am Woman are true stories too, and so, in outline, is Impromptu. Bella (2006) is a gentle drama about one day in New York in which a cook, once a famous footballer, walks out of his brother's restaurant to help a waitress who has just lost her job.

Faces to follow

The television romances have a company of regular players, and following one of them is a good way to explore. Lacey Chabert leads five films here. Autumn Reeser stars in A Country Wedding, I Do, I Do, I Do, Midnight Masquerade and Love on the Menu. Jen Lilley is in Yes, I Do, Eat, Play, Love and A Dash of Love; Andrew W. Walker in Bridal Wave, Bottled with Love and Sweet Autumn; Luke Macfarlane in The Birthday Wish, Just Add Romance and A Valentine's Match; and Rachael Leigh Cook in Frozen in Love and Autumn in the Vineyard. Bethany Joy Lenz, Nikki DeLoach, Ashley Williams, Jessy Schram and Trevor Donovan each appear twice.

Among actors from the cinema, Diane Keaton is in Darling Companion and Love, Weddings & Other Disasters, Kevin Kline in Darling Companion and As You Like It, Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career and Impromptu, and Romola Garai in I Capture the Castle and As You Like It. Laurence Olivier, near the end of his career, appears in both A Little Romance and The Jazz Singer. Bill Nighy is in The Girl in the Café and I Capture the Castle, and Kathy Bates gives Angus its heart. Blythe Danner is in The Love Letter (1999), a comedy about an unsigned letter that passes from hand to hand in a New England town, and in The Tomorrow Man.

Places worth the journey

Much of the appeal of these films lies in where they are set. The Italian coast of Enchanted April was filmed at the very castle above Portofino where the novelist stayed in 1921. Shadows in the Sun (2005) takes a young editor to a village in Tuscany to persuade a reclusive writer, played by Harvey Keitel, to finish a book. Paris appears in A Little Romance and Her Pen Pal, Venice at the end of the first, Bruges in Love, Romance & Chocolate, and Spain, from the green north to Andalusia, in The Trip to Spain.

The American small town is the home ground of the television romance, and it appears in every region: the New England of Falling for Vermont, The Love Letter and Sand Dollar Cove, the ranch country of Big Sky River and Love Finds You in Valentine, the wine valleys of California in Autumn in the Vineyard, and the Pacific coast in You're Bacon Me Crazy. Journeys abroad are rarer, but At Midnight (2023) is set in a resort hotel in Mexico and A Prince in Paradise on a tropical island. Five Blind Dates (2024) is set in the tea shops of Sydney, and Today's Special and Sylvie's Love show two very different New Yorks.

A first month

A newcomer could spend a first month with BingeBox as follows. In the first week watch Enchanted April, which sets the tone for everything else, and then All of My Heart, to see what the television romance does well. In the second week take two comedies, Cold Comfort Farm and Mother. In the third week try A Little Romance with the family and The Girl in the Café afterwards. In the fourth, choose a film for the season outside the window from the list of the four seasons, and finish with Love Sarah. That makes eight films, and by the end the lists of classics, television films, comedy and food will each have a familiar landmark.

Households with children can follow a different path. Angus, Little Secrets, Chang Can Dunk, The Last Dragonslayer, A Mermaid's Tale, All Stars, 13: The Musical and The Wiz Live! are all suitable for viewers from about eight years old. A Little Romance, Ice Castles, Jane Eyre and I Capture the Castle suit children a little older, and the television romances, with very few exceptions, can be watched by the whole family together.

How the films were chosen

The catalogue began with a search of TMDB for English-language romances, comedies, family films, music films and films made for television. That search returned several thousand titles, of which a large number already belonged to sister guides. Every title on BingeBox is unique to this site. Thrillers, horror films, crime stories and films of armed conflict were set aside at once, and the remainder was read through by hand, story by story and poster by poster. Comedies made for adult audiences were removed, as were stand-up performances and concert recordings, and 179 remained.

A few of the films kept are aimed at adults in their subject, though mild in treatment: Starting Over, The Four Seasons, Too Big to Fail and 'Round Midnight among them. The descriptions on their pages make the tone clear. Scores, cast lists and descriptions come from TMDB, and the Watch now links are provided by JustWatch, which records where each film is officially available country by country. Television films move between services more often than cinema films do, and it is worth checking the page again if a title is missing in your country today.

Using BingeBox

Search is the quickest route to a film whose name you know. Begin to type in the rounded field in the bar at the top and matches appear under it at once, each with its year. The Movies page lists the whole catalogue with the most popular titles first, and the A-Z page sets all 179 in alphabetical order, one letter to a page. The rows on the home page are a good way to wander, and the View all link at the end of each heading opens its full list.

My List is a shortlist for the evenings ahead. The Add to My List button on a film page puts the title on it, and the indigo button in the bar opens the list from any page. The titles are stored on your own device by the browser; BingeBox keeps neither accounts nor passwords, the list is there when you come back, and its export button saves it as a small file for a second device. Viewers of the seasonal romances often build a list in September and work through it until spring.

The help pages explain each part of the site in a few lines. How to watch describes the path from a poster to an official service, Finding titles covers the search and the lists, and My List explains the list. There are short guides to romance, television films, weddings and royals, kitchens and cafés, the four seasons, small towns, comedy, drama, family films, music and the classics, and a page that goes year by year.

Questions and answers

Questions