Filmmakers always seem to be trying to find ways to add some pizzazz to the tried-and-true rom-com formula. Recently, we’ve seen One Night Only attempt this with a kind-of-creepy premise and Voicemails for Isabelle enlisting the help of Taylor Swift for possibly the best movie I’ve seen on Netflix this year. This weekend brings another new romantic comedy to the 2026 movie calendar in Finding Emily, and while it’s Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m not sure I trust its high score.Finding Emily has an interesting premise, as it sees Owen (Spike Fearn) searching for his dream girl, whose name is Emily, and he teams up with psychology student Emily Raine (Angourie Rice) to do so. Rotten Tomatoes has the rom-com premiering at 87%, but the reviews I’ve read don’t make it sound like such an open-and-shut case. Take The Wrap’s Amelia Emberwing, for example. This critic acknowledges that romantic comedies don’t need to be technically masterful to be good, but she says this one is so poorly written it’s not even empty-calorie fun:Finding Emily is a film packed to the brim with tertiary characters, every single one of which is a caricature. From Minnie Driver’s detached principle to Kat Ronney’s Emily Thewlis — the angry feminist — not a single woman in this film is a person. Rice’s Emily is as close as the film comes, but she’s so detached from her own reality that any ‘depth’ barely counts as a success.Angie Han of THR agrees, saying that Finding Emily’s issue isn’t that no one acts like a real and reasonable human being, because nobody who watches rom-coms fully expects to see that anyway. She says:The problem with Finding Emily is that it’s so busy reassuring you how delightful it is that none of its characters act like real and reasonable human beings that it forgets to conjure the necessary magic to make you love them anyway. Lacking not just in sense but charm and chemistry to boot, this would-be defense of rom-com tropes against our jaded age ends up, instead, far more cynical than any of the criticisms it’s supposedly fighting against.Beandrea July of The New York Times says the Emilys only exist to serve Owen’s quest, taking what could have been a quirky, Gen Z perspective on the rom-com and losing itself to the old formula. The critic’s Finding Emily review reads:Throughout Finding Emily, moments suggest a more daring, sharper romantic comedy about the stories people construct to avoid vulnerability. Unfortunately, the film spends too much time searching for that version of itself, leaning uncomfortably on a traditional rom-com formula that it never finds a way to subvert.However, with a Rotten Tomatoes score that high, of course there were positive reviews as well. Lindsey Bahr of the AP rates the movie 3 stars out of 4, saying it nods to the best ‘90s-era Brit rom-coms but adds a grain of Gen Z salt to deliver the smart, funny and sweet story that audiences deserve. Bahr continues:One especially fresh aspect of Finding Emily is that the will-they-won’t-they isn’t even the real driving force of our interest. Are we really rooting for Owen and American Emily? Do we think they might, gasp, last if it happens? This movie knows what it is. It knows that its leads are in their early 20s, and it knows that we can enjoy spending time with them without investing too much in a possible relationship.Guy Lodge of Variety agrees with that, writing that Finding Emily gives the typical romantic comedy a Gen Z makeover that’s both fresh and funny. Lodge says:Director Alicia MacDonald‘s film is both … smart enough to identify the GenZ sexual politics that make a fool’s errand of the supposedly grand gestures that are the romcom’s stock-in-trade, and sweet enough to know when those gestures work anyway.When I first started looking into Finding Emily reviews, the movie was at an impressive 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it not just one of the year's highest-rated rom-coms, but one of 2026's best movies overall. However, as more reviews rolled in, that number started to fall, and my confidence went with it.Look, I love a good rom-com (I’ve even been known to love some not-very-good rom-coms), and I’ve been intrigued by this one since I first heard about it. I’m going to check it out even if I’m not completely confident in its high Rotten Tomatoes score, and if you want to do the same, you can do so in theaters starting Friday. August 28.