Cozy Movies for the First Cool Weekend

Nothing says autumn like Meg Ryan promising to send someone a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils. The whole thing is basically a love letter to fall in New York, complete with cozy bookshops and turtlenecks. It's a rom-com from before texting existed that still nails the specific torture of watching three dots appear and disappear.

With "Practical Magic 2" hitting theaters this September, it's the perfect time to revisit the original. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman play witch sisters in a rambling seaside house that deserves its own credit in the opening titles. There's margarita-making at midnight, a little light necromancy and the kind of family dysfunction only two decades of secrets can brew.

This is the one that gave us the loudest deli scene in film history and a blueprint for every "will they, won't they" that followed. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan spend years circling each other while the leaves turn and the sweaters get thicker. It's talky in the best way, the kind of film you can half-watch while folding laundry and still catch every good line.

Two women swap houses for the holidays and end up swapping lives, one of them landing in a snow-dusted English cottage so charming you'll start browsing countryside listings. There are crackling fireplaces, duvets you could sink into for a week and Jude Law being improbably lovely.

"I'm also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her." People have been quoting that line in one form or another for the past 25 years, and we owe it all to this movie. Hugh Grant does his floppy-haired stammering better than anyone before or since as the rumpled London bookshop owner who spills orange juice on the most famous woman on the planet, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Before "You've Got Mail" there was this black-and-white original. Two co-workers in a Budapest gift shop can't stand each other, all while secretly falling for their anonymous pen pals, who are, of course, each other. It's proof that the ache of waiting for a letter back is timeless, whether it arrives by post or by dial-up modem (which was actually more painful).

Diane Keaton pads around a dream Hamptons beach house in cream turtlenecks, hilariously crying at her laptop and eating pancakes at midnight. Jack Nicholson is the aging bad boy who has a heart attack at the worst possible moment and gets stuck recuperating under her roof. They bicker, they soften and you come away wanting white slipcovers and a beach house you'll never afford.

Juliette Binoche blows into a buttoned-up French village and opens a chocolate shop right as everyone's giving up sweets for Lent. The whole film looks like it tastes like the melted middle of a truffle, all copper pots and red interiors while the wind rattles outside. By the time Johnny Depp floats in on a riverboat, resistance is futile and you're pausing the movie to raid your pantry.

A down-on-her-luck governess in 1930s London stumbles into a job wrangling the chaotic love life of a flighty American singer, and her whole world cracks open in 24 hours. It's Frances McDormand and Amy Adams swanning through nightclubs, satin gowns and Art Deco apartments while war looms at the edges. You'll walk away weirdly convinced your own life could turn around in a single, very well-dressed afternoon.

Meryl Streep plays Julia Child so joyfully you can practically smell the butter through the screen and there is a lot of butter. The movie braids together two kitchens across 50 years, Julia finding herself in postwar Paris and a stuck blogger cooking her way through every last recipe. Watch it on an empty stomach at your own risk.