NoBadPicks

Movies Like Love & Pop

If you loved Love & Pop's Drama storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.

Top Picks

Ocean Waves
6.4

Ocean Waves

1993

At Kichijōji Station, Tokyo, Taku Morisaki glimpses a familiar woman on the platform opposite boarding a train. Later, her photo falls from a shelf as he exits his apartment before flying to Kōchi Prefecture. Picking it up, he looks at it briefly before leaving. As the aeroplane takes off, he narrates the events that brought her into his life...

Radiance
6.5

Radiance

2017

The story follows the social intercourse between a cameraman, Masaya, with a visual impairment, and Misako who disconnects from the world.

April Story
7.1

April Story

1998

In spring, a girl leaves the island of Hokkaido to attend university in Tokyo. Once there, she is asked to reveal why she wanted to go there in the first place.

Real
6.2

Real

2013

Neurosurgeon Koichi uses an experimental technique to enter the brain of his beloved Atsumi, who is in a coma after attempting suicide. In his quest, Koichi drifts steadily further into the sweltering marshes of the spirit. It is soon no longer clear what is real and what is not.

Gracie
6.2

Gracie

2007

A teenager faces an uphill battle when she fights to give women the opportunity to play competitive soccer.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
7.8

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

2006

When 17-year-old Makoto Konno gains the ability to 'leap' backwards through time, she immediately sets about improving her grades and preventing personal mishaps. However, she soon realises that changing the past isn't as simple as it seems, and eventually, will have to rely on her new powers to shape the future of herself and her friends.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
8.3

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion

1997

SEELE orders an all-out attack on NERV, aiming to destroy the Evas before Gendo can advance his own plans for the Human Instrumentality Project. Shinji is pushed to the limits of his sanity as he is forced to decide the fate of humanity.

Dreams
7.7

Dreams

1990

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

More Movies Like Love & Pop

Café Lumière
6.7

Café Lumière

2004

In a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past, Yoko is a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry and has found a kindred spirit in a used bookstore owner who aids her research.

Heavenly Forest
7.5

Heavenly Forest

2006

Amateur photographer Makoto and the homely but endearing Shizuru meet during their university entrance ceremony and become instant friends. Shy by nature, Makoto finds himself opening up around Shizuru, who is secretly in love with him.

The Taste of Tea
7.5

The Taste of Tea

2004

A spell of time in the life of a family in rural Tochigi prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.

Weathering with You
8.0

Weathering with You

2019

The summer of his high school freshman year, Hodaka runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if taking its cue from his life. After many days of solitude, he finally finds work as a freelance writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then, one day, Hodaka meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong-willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky.

Love Exposure
8.0

Love Exposure

2008

The story of a teenage boy called Yu, who falls for Yoko, a girl he runs into while working as an upskirt photographer in an offshoot of the porn industry. His attempts to woo her are complicated by a spot of cross-dressing – which convinces Yoko that she is lesbian – dalliances with kung-fu and crime, and a constant struggle with Catholic guilt.

Suicide Forest Village
6.5

Suicide Forest Village

2021

One day a mysterious box arrived and a curse began to spread all over. The source of the box is 'Jukai Village'. The village is hidden in Jukai Forest, a suicide spot that once you enter it, you can never come out.

Only Yesterday
7.4

Only Yesterday

1991

In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko contemplates the arc of her life, and wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.

Little Ashes
5.9

Little Ashes

2008

About the young life and loves of artist Salvador Dalí, filmmaker Luis Buñuel and writer Federico García Lorca.

The Ballad of Narayama
7.5

The Ballad of Narayama

1983

In a small village in a valley everyone who reaches the age of 70 must leave the village and go to a certain mountain top to die. If anyone should refuse they would disgrace their family. Old Orin is 69. This winter it is her turn to go to the mountain. But first she must make sure that her eldest son Tatsuhei finds a wife.

Lost in Translation
7.4

Lost in Translation

2003

Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.

Linda Linda Linda
7.5

Linda Linda Linda

2005

Only three days before their high school festival, guitarist Kei, drummer Kyoko, and bassist Nozomi are forced to recruit a new lead vocalist for their band. They choose Korean exchange student Son, though her comprehension of Japanese is a bit rough! It's a race against time as the group struggles to learn three songs for the festival's rock concert—including a classic '80s song by the Japanese punk rock band The Blue Hearts called "Linda Linda".

Orange
7.3

Orange

2015

A girl mysteriously receives advice from her future self and as a result her group of friends, along with a newly arrived, troubled classmate, learn how to be better friends and a better community.

Why These Movies Are Similar

These recommendations share core qualities with Love & Pop (1998): Drama themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of Love & Pop.

See full details for Love & Pop (1998)

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