The 100 most romantic films of all time (updated for 2026)

Director: Vincent Gallo

Cast: Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci

Nothing about Gallo's winningly strange debut feature approaches romance in a fashion most viewers are likely to recognise, or even desire. Stockholm Syndrome is a tricky concept at the best of times, and when the captor is Billy, a maladjusted, abusive ex-con played by Gallo, it's fair to say our perceptions of love's limits and limitations are being tested.

Yet as Layla, the zoned-out tap dancer Billy kidnaps so she can pose as his wife at his ghastly parents' house, gawkily luminous Ricci somehow persuades us that there's something to be saved in this lonely wastrel – though probably not in their bizarre relationship. It's a love we can believe, even if we can't quite believe in it. GL

Director: Mati Diop

Cast: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré

An almost indefinable collision of romance, ghost story and social realism, Mati Diop’s Senegal-set film is unlike anything you’ve seen before and yet is still utterly relatable – after all, the feeling of being haunted by a lost love is something we can all understand. Here it’s Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), a determined young woman stuck in a loveless engagement, who follows her heart to some weird and wonderful places. It’s a journey worth going on. AS

Director: Steve Kloves

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer, Beau Bridges

Pop culture’s chief takeaway from Steve Kloves’s still-electric directorial debut has been the sight of a never-more-smokin’ Michelle Pfeiffer in a blood-red velvet dress making a grand piano her bitch as she burns through a rendition of ‘Makin’ Whoopee’. And sure, that’s a pretty great takeaway, but it ignores what a smart, sad tale of attraction, ambition and disappointment the whole film is, with a bristling romantic connection between Pfeiffer’s lounge singer and Jeff Bridges’ charismatic manchild pianist. Hollywood missed a trick by never pairing those two again, but then it also hasn’t made the most of Kloves, who got to make just one more film – before minting it by scripting the Harry Potter series. GL

Director: Jean Genet

Cast: Java, André Reybaz, Lucien Sénémaud

Jean Genet had already been discharged from the French Foreign Legion for indecency, bummed around Europe as a thief and rent-boy, and forged a strong literary reputation before he made this silent, clandestinely-shot 26-minute short in 1950. It’s a potent combination of the raw and the poetic, as male prisoners writhe under the lustful eye of a peeping guard, dreaming of encounters metaphorical and corporeal.

Its explicit gaze is still pretty eye-popping by conventional standards, and in 1966 a California court banned Un Chant d’Amour, pronouncing it ‘cheap pornography calculated to promote homosexuality, perversion and morbid sex practices’. Needless to say, it became an underground sensation (though nowadays it’s on Youtube), and a touchstone for future film-makers including Kenneth Anger, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes. TJ

Director: David Lean

Cast: Julie Christie, Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin

David Lean’s super-sized epic of love lost and found – several times over – across a half-century of tumultuous Russian history may seem to have fallen slightly out of fashion these days. But you need only have counted the not-so-subtle references to its florid aesthetic in Joe Wright’s recent Anna Karenina to see how it captured the imagination of more than one generation. Not for nothing was Maurice Jarre’s swirling ‘Lara’s Theme’ a Top 10 hit in its day, after all.

Still, the lush sound and iconography of Zhivago – that wedding-cake ice palace, those fashion-spread furs – has rather superceded the knotty, compromised politics of its love story, a cruel triangle in which different viewers may find themselves sympathising with different sides. GL

Director: Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Cast: Gerard Depardieu, Anne Brochet

Russia’s most celebrated film talent since Eisenstein – the inimitable Gérard Depardieu – achieved the unusual feat of securing an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a foreign language film for his portrayal of France’s answer to the Elephant Man.

Despite his unconventional looks, Cyrano is a spectacular lover – at least on paper, writing letters that cause sexy cousin Roxane (Anne Brochet) to fall deeply in love with the man from whom she erroneously believes she’s received the billets-doux – the dashing but inarticulate Christian (Vincent Perez). Unlike José Ferrer, who did win the Oscar for his 1950 portrayal of Cyrano, Depardieu didn’t take home the little gold statue in the end, but it’s probably his take on Cyrano that’s become the more iconic. CB

Director: Arthur Penn

Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are often cited as poster children for the modern gangster movie, though rather less often as any sort of romantic ideal. Maybe because most good roadtrips tend not to take in bank heists and few good dates end in a hail of bullets. But Arthur Penn’s hand grenade of a movie rings with the kind of erotic charge few out-and-out romances can match, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway summoning a magnetic connection that’s fritzed up to the very last by misunderstanding, anxiety and sexual angst. It makes their bond human, relatable and ultimately, deeply tender. Who wants ideals anyway? PDS

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis

On the surface, David Cronenberg’s famously icky B-movie remake is about a hubristic scientist mutating into a human-insect hybrid. What makes The Fly more than just a nauseating endurance test, though, is the tragic love story at its core. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis were a real-life couple at the time, and their heady chemistry buoyed the film beyond its gross-out set pieces and sci-fi plotting.

If anything about their relationship rang false, the movie could quickly devolve into eye-rolling – albeit disgusting – comedy. As delivered, watching Davis cling to the man she loves as he gradually sheds every last bit of his humanity is as gut-wrenching as it is stomach-turning. It’s body horror that recognises that there is no more monstrous part of the human body than the heart. You just might want to make sure you know your partner really well before suggesting it as a Valentine’s Day watch. MS

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone

Damien Chazelle’s modern take on the old Hollywood musical definitely serves up a good portion of cheese, but somehow manages to avoid the trappings of other recent movie musicals. It’s a film that, despite people bursting into song and dance at seemingly random moments, feels genuinely natural. The pairing of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as Mia and Sebastian, two creative types trying to cut it in Los Angeles, is electric. Both actors acutely capture the way their character’s own desires, ambitions and passions keep the path of true love far from smooth. Their on-screen chemistry, even when the mood sours, leaves a lingering and haunting memory. Somehow, you feel that these two will find a way back into each other’s lives one day. AK

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez

Did the ’90s produce a hotter onscreen couple than George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez? Did any decade? Neither were fully fledged movie stars yet, but together they generate an ionic charge that vibrates throughout Steven Soderbergh’s snappy crime caper, a standout adaptation of Elmore Leonard. He’s a prolific bank robber, she’s a US Marshal, who meet cute in the trunk of a car and proceed to play a game of interstate cat-and-mouse, culminating in a seriously sexy tryst in a Detroit hotel. If it were simply a straightforward heist flick, it’d still be fun, quick-witted and stylish, but their illicit love affair, and molten romantic chemistry, place it among the best work all involved has ever done. MS

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek

Terrence Malick doesn’t so much make movies as create universes, and Badlands features perhaps the most enticing of them all. In this world of freedom, adventure and immorality, Holly (Sissy Spacek) and Kit (Martin Sheen) live, love, drive and commit murder. The lovers-on-the-run movie was already a cliché by the time Malick came to shoot his debut feature, but he gave it new life, and refreshed American cinema in the process. As a depiction of suburbia it’s dreamlike and beautifully photographed. As a film about the shock and excitement of first love it’s swooningly romantic and vibrant, and Martin Sheen sure can rock a grimy t-shirt. TH

Director: Miguel Gomes

Cast: Ana Moreira, Carloto Cotta

The title of Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’s woozy monochrome trance of a movie (as well as its chapter headings of Paradise and Paradise Lost) is pinched from FW Murnau’s silent epic of star-crossed love in the South Seas. In no other sense, however, is this wistful, structurally intricate evocation of a forbidden affair in Portuguese-occupied Africa in the 1960s – and the ways in which it haunts those involved decades on – like anything you’ve seen before. Gomes blends sharp, post-colonial political perspective with passages of pure, besotted reverie. Glowing, lucid memories of a woman’s romantic history illuminate her far more unloved present. Tabu offers a poignantly literal interpretation of LP Hartley’s assertion that the past is a foreign country. All that, and a weepy Portuguese rendition of ‘Be My Baby’ on the soundtrack. GL

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon

The romance in Some Like It Hot is very much of the anything-goes, outsider sort. Wilder’s brilliant, high-energy transvestite comedy is a celebration of folk from the other side of the tracks dressed up as a madcap farce in which Curtis and Lemmon spend most of the film disguised as female musicians and on the run from the Chicago mob in 1929. It’s also, of course, a vehicle for Monroe’s beauty, charm and amply-platformed cleavage (seriously, check out her dresses in her two musical numbers).

Most of the fun lies in gender-bending games of mistaken identity that would make Shakespeare proud. But there’s also some real feeling here, both between Curtis and Monroe and, most bizarrely if fleetingly, between Lemmon and an ageing playboy. Delightful and giddy. DC

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina

This anarchic romance was made by French New Wave filmmaker Godard at the height of his powers and starred his then-girlfriend Karina and Belmondo, the thick-lipped, brooding star of his earlier Breathless. It foreshadows Bonnie and Clyde in its story of a beautiful, lawless couple leaving polite society behind and going on the run, from Paris to the Med, pursued by gangsters.

It’s a cluttered burst of colours, ideas and emotions – a frantic essay on real life and movie life that overflows with energy and heady thoughts. It looks and feels like an outlaw romance, with Karina and Belmondo bringing style and attitude to the table, but it’s also a strongly experimental work made by someone determined to shake up cinema and the world. That itself is pretty romantic, no? DC

Director: Wong Kar-Wai

Cast: Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin

Wong Kar-Wai’s third feature remains a perennially fresh declaration of his unique aesthetic, where the accretion of voiceover, music cues, faces and places creates an immersive mood more significant than whatever passes for a plot.

In this instance, that involves two sets of would-be lovers – policeman Kaneshiro falls for shady lady Brigitte Lin, while his colleague Leung circles around winsome kebab-stall girl Faye Wong. Still, the idea of actually getting it together is much less headily intoxicating than the sweet ache of a broken heart, or the woozy rush of unconsummated possibility. Meanwhile, Wong’s stop-go camera captures the restless bustle of pre-handover Hong Kong, and the melancholy sway of the original ‘California Dreaming’ sets the seal on an off-hand masterpiece. TJ

Director: David O Russell

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence

You know that moment when you meet someone for the first time and something clicks? Maybe you bond over a mutual hatred of beetroot. Or love the same film? That’s exactly what happens to Pat (Bradley Cooper) and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) in Silver Linings Playbook – except it’s anti-depressant side effects they bond over.

He’s recovering from a nasty manic episode. She’s been sleeping around since her husband died (‘I'm just the crazy slut with a dead husband!’) As romcoms go, this is awkward and messy, but motors on offbeat energy and a fast-paced wisecracking script. It’s a date movie with a beating heart, a story that believes in love. A happy pill of a film. CC

Director: Cameron Crowe

Cast: John Cusack, Ione Skye

Young love has rarely seemed more adult than in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut. That’s not to say the characters are mature beyond their years: John Cusack, as aspiring kickboxer Lloyd Dobler, is a lovably earnest teenage underachiever whose only goal post-graduation is to woo Ione Skye’s Diane Court, the class valedictorian who seems far out of everyone’s league. He’s directionless, she’s naive to the harsh realities of life after high school. But neither is a straightforward archetype, and Crowe paints their relationship with a tender realism closer to Richard Linklater than John Hughes. And unlike other teen romances, you believe theirs is made to last – even if everything you know in your cold, grown-up heart says otherwise. MS

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: Ellen Page, Michael Cera

On release, first-time scriptwriter Diablo Cody’s Oscar-winning unplanned teen pregnancy comedy Juno was all-but obscured by one debate: was it a pro-lifer tract deceptively gussied up in indie clothing?

The film’s abortion issues are still up for debate; leaving that aside for a moment, what’s left is a sweetly funny romantic comedy about relationships both teen- and middle-aged, and love of many kinds: parental, romantic and platonic. And sure, the teen-speak might bear about as much resemblance to real teenage slang as the actors in Grease did to actual teenagers, but Ellen Page and Michael Cera’s performances remain pitch perfect. CB

Directors: Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

Cast: Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson

No, not Cocteau’s 1946 masterpiece (you’ll find that elsewhere) nor the 2017 live-action remake starring Emma Watson. Rather, Disney’s magical cartoon, made in 1991 but harking back to the studio’s glory days. Unlike the golden oldies, however, this fairy tale features a plucky heroine, Belle, who braves slathering wolves to rescue her dad from the Beast’s terrifying gothic castle.

In fact, the Beast is a young prince turned into a monster for his cruelty by the curse of an enchantress. Only three little words can break the spell. It’s impossible not to be swept along by the gorgeous Broadway-style song and dance numbers and by what one philosopher called the fairy tale’s ‘great message’ – ‘that a thing must be loved before it is lovable’. CC

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor, Virginia Field

The young Vivien Leigh will always be remembered for her indomitable Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. But she also displayed heartbreaking fragility in this famous version of Robert E Sherwood’s play, an ill-starred romance ’twixt soldier and ballerina set against the chaos of war.

As WWII breaks out, colonel Taylor finds himself on Waterloo Bridge, assailed by memories of his whirlwind love affair in the same city during the Great War. Cue triple-strength schmaltz in the golden-age Hollywood manner as fate comes between the radiant couple, though not before they’ve shared an all-time classic clinch on New Year’s Eve, breathily smooching as lights are extinguished round a darkening dancefloor. Passion and foreboding in potent harmony. TJ

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cast: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz

It’s the movie that launched a thousand mini-breaks to Paris. Amélie charmed the world’s socks off in 2001, a surprise international hit. Audrey Tautou is irresistible as lonely waitress Amélie, who discovers her purpose in life: to make other people happy with anonymous acts of kindness.

A whimsical fairytale, it’s filled with playful, funny touches. The best is Amélie standing on a balcony overlooking Montmartre wondering how many people are having an orgasm at this second. The answer is 15 – director Jean-Pierre Jeunet shows them. He originally cast the British actress Emily Watson in the lead. When she quit, he’d all but given up hope of finding his Amélie, until he spotted Tautou on a film poster in the street. Now it’s impossible to imagine any other actress in the role. CC

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson

The warm heart beating at the center of this ice-cold Swedish horror yarn belongs to Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a bullied 12-year-old who finds friendship with a fellow outcast (Lina Leandersson), who just so happens to be a century-old vampire trapped in a pre-teen body. Never mind that it’s likely the killer next door is grooming young Oskar for a life of murderous servitude: To young, lonely Oskar, the affection and companionship he finds in his curious new crush are everything, the only comfort he can find in a frigid world. When the two share moments of tenderness – a trip to a winter fair, a fleetingly joyous dance in a dark apartment — it feels like everything will turn out okay for the pair. It won’t – by the end, the two are fleeing home amid a pile of bodies – but hey, that’s love. APK

Director: Elia Kazan

Cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle

Rural Kansas, 1928, when ‘nice’ girls were supposed to hold out until the wedding night. Every fibre of her being is telling high-schooler Natalie Wood she wants alpha male Warren Beatty right now, but his oil magnate dad has decided she’s too ordinary for marriage. Welcome to a world before contraception, as acclaimed playwright William Inge’s Oscar-winning script puts in place a devastating conflict between fundamental human desires and layers of obfuscating social hypocrisy.

Both in their early twenties at the time, Beatty and Wood make a sensual couple, as director Kazan constructs a pristine vision of Americana, played against a coruscating narrative where yearning slides uncontrollably into hysteria. Wood’s startling performance deserved an Oscar but got only a nomination. TJ

Director: George Cukor

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Doris Nolan

Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story crop up more frequently in classic movie archives, but George Cukor’s 1938 Holiday remains cinema’s most sparkling screwball pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Grant plays a self-made professional whose dreamier impulses don’t match the sensible life he’s fashioned for himself; Hepburn is the free-spirited sister of his wealthy, straitlaced fiancée, in whom he finds himself curiously able to confide his most fanciful ambitions. Will chemistry and an instinctive connection triumph over practical planning? Does Grant look good in a sharply cut suit? It’s all in the witty, buoyant execution here, and in the stars’ palpable, infectious enjoyment of each other – the inevitability of their characters’ joint happiness doesn’t make you root any less hard for them. GL

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell

Okay, so it didn’t do much to promote a realistic image of London around the world. (No, we don’t all live in enormous mansion flats. No, we don’t all have floppy hair. Yes, we do say ‘fuck’ a lot.) But Richard Curtis’s frightfully well-spoken romcom has charm to burn. Much of that is down to Hugh Grant’s effortless performance as Charles, the loveless fop whose route to a woman’s heart includes quoting The Partridge Family and saying ‘gosh’ a lot. It may take a late-in-the-day lunge into tearjerker territory (the clue’s in the title, folks). But overall this is sweet, witty, endlessly watchable stuff. Oh, and Kristin Scott Thomas is magic. TH

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill

Essentially one of the first romcoms, as well as an undisputed silent era highlight, City Lights sees Chaplin’s Little Tramp fall for a blind flower girl and accidentally-on-purpose lead her to believe he’s a millionaire.

Shenanigans ensue, with plenty of the kind of old-timey gags beloved of The Simpsons and Family Guy cutaways, some of which have dated, and some of which still seem as fresh as any Frat Pack set piece (a frenetic drunk driving sequence boasts the immortal exchange: ‘Watch your driving!’ ‘Am I driving?’). But it’s the rom more than the com that keeps us coming back to City Lights – the quite literally touching finale is undiminished. CB

Director: John Carney

Cast: Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova

It’s one of the great underdog success stories in all of cinema – a low-budget indie-folk musical from an unheralded Irish director, starring two little-known musicians, that ended up getting nominated for an Oscar and spinning off into a popular stage play. Once truly came out of nowhere, but it’s easy to see why everyone fell for it, including its leads, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who briefly became a real-life couple.

He’s a busker and part-time vacuum cleaner repairman, she’s an immigrant flower seller, who meet on the streets of Dublin and forge a connection over music and heartbreak. It’s not a whirlwind romance – in fact, it never becomes a full-fledged romance at all. She has a husband back home in the Czech Republic, and he has his eyes on London. But it is a love affair, of the unconsummated sort that plays out in cafes and bus stations and random street corners across the world millions of times a day. It’s never spoken of, but it is sung, in the aching, gorgeously spare music the pair end up recording together. It has the tenor of a fairy tale but the emotional resonance of real life. No wonder it charmed the world. MS.

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams

The, er, literary oeuvre of Nicholas Sparks has been churned into an awful lot of insipid Hollywood schlock – nobody past puberty got misty-eyed over Miley Cyrus in The Last Song, and surely no one of any age remembers Kevin Costner in Message in a Bottle.

On the face of it, it’s hard to say why the aggressively sentimental The Notebook is any different. But there’s something so earnest about the way this star-crossed teen romance – he’s a common country boy, she’s a beautiful heiress, you do the math – hits its clichéd marks that the film itself takes on the unassailable, idealistic purity of first love. Magic casting, too: here’s where the world’s love affair with Ryan Gosling started, before he got way too cool for this sort of thing. GL

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck

It was the film that made Hepburn an overnight star at the age of 22. She fizzes as tomboyish Princess Ann, who is bored to tears of dreary ambassadors’ balls and hobnobbing with crusty old majors with walrus moustaches.

On a state visit to Rome, Anne slips away to see how the other half live. Peck is the American reporter who can’t believe his luck, picking up a real-life runaway princess. Sure, he tells her, he’ll show her the sights… On the sly he’s cooking up the scoop of the century. Of course they fall in love. Swoon at its near-perfect ending, with its tender message that a moment’s happiness can last you a lifetime. CC

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin

Some of the greatest love stories hinge on denial rather than devotion. Philip Kaufman's shiveringly erotic adaptation of Milan Kundera's 1968-set novel – which many thought too tangled up in its characters’ psychologies to be filmed at all – is remarkable for the romance it builds around a man with no desire to be in love.

Daniel Day-Lewis is ideally cast as Tomas, a young Czech surgeon whose pursuit of an emotion-free sex life is fostered and challenged, respectively, by Lena Olin's uptown artist and Juliette Binoche's sincerely adoring country waif. Between and beyond this brittle love triangle are some of the sexiest sex scenes ever put to celluloid, as the Prague Spring withers and the true cost of free love is learned. GL

Director: Céline Sciamma

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel

Girlhood director Céline Sciamma delivers a gorgeous love story that lays bare the desires of two young women in a cold and unforgiving social climate in the eighteenth century. Backdropped by a rugged, windswept Breton landscape, it’s a masterpiece of quiet passions that has the taste of sea salt on its lips and fire in its eyes. AS

Director: Fatih Akin

Cast: Birol Ünel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck

Judging by his ravaged-rocker looks, Turkish-born, Hamburg-resident Birol Ünel is heading for oblivion by the scenic route – drink, drugs, sex, argy-bargy – and that’s before he drives his car head-on into a wall. The last thing he needs while recovering in a psychiatric unit is an offer of marriage from fellow patient Sibel Kekilli, another Turkish-German misfit of equally volatile temperament.

The mayhem which follows has a lot to say about the travails of growing up between two cultures – one ultra-liberal, the other repressive – but amid all the rage, blood and aggro of a truly headbanging storyline, there’s a profoundly moving recognition of the power of love to bring meaning and commitment where previously only existed substance-fuelled nihilism. A stone-cold modern classic. TJ

Director: Jane Campion

Cast: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw

The lives of great romantic artists don’t always make for great romantic cinema; in the case of poet John Keats, living up to his words is a tall order for any filmmaker. But Jane Campion’s wondrous, petal-delicate film not only finds a shimmering visual language that’s wholly in sympathy with the great man’s turn of phrase, but applies his poetry in a real-world context that never feels too precious or contrived. Keats’s feyness is counteracted by the headstrong candour of Fanny Brawne, the young seamstress who became his great love, played beautifully by Abbie Cornish. Campion traces their romance as one of opposing, complementary sensibilities and a tragically shared vulnerability. By the end, the sonnet referenced by the title becomes a tear-inducing expression of grief. GL

Directors: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

Cast: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen

The story of the transition from silent movies to the 'talkies' has created a sub-genre all of its own, including movies from Sunset Blvd (1950) to The Artist (2011). Here, it's a light-hearted affair set in the late 1920s as silent star Don Lockwood (Kelly) bumps into Kathy Selden (Reynolds), a chorus girl, when he leaps into her car and she pretends to be a serious actress.

It's a classic case of chilly antagonism thawing into true love as Don and Kathy finally fall for each other and become colleagues when his studio wants to make a talking picture and she has to step in to replace the unappealing voice of movie star Lina Lamont (Hagen). But more famous than any romance, surely, is the opening-credits song-and-dance sequence of Kelly and co performing the title tune? DC

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Peter Falk

What would you give up for love? Smoking? A job? How about immortality? In Wim Wenders’ remarkable metaphysical fantasy, an angel stationed in Berlin since the dawn of time (Ganz) relinquishes eternity to experience the earthly delights of coffee, cigarettes, Nick Cave concerts and the companionship of a lonely trapeze artist (Dommartin).

Hollywood, naturally, turned the idea into the middlebrow pablum of City of Angels, thus bequeathing the world the hit soundtrack song ‘Iris’ by the Goo Goo Dolls. But Wenders’ film is far more poetic and ruminative, contemplating nothing less than the idea of what it means to be human – and the possible divinity of Peter Falk. Atheists, beware: it’s as convincing an argument for the existence of an afterlife as anything from the late 20th century. The question is if it’s any better than the life we already have. MS

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor

‘You’d think people would have had enough of silly love songs,’ Ewan McGregor sings in the centrepiece medley of this gloriously exploded pop musical, but director Baz Luhrmann looks around him and sees it ain’t so. More love songs! More sequins! More dancers! More everything! A paean to excess in every department from emotion to interior decoration, Moulin Rouge! (never forget the exclamation mark) understandably drives a lot of viewers dilly. But in the wild postmodern glitter-wash it applies to a slender boy-meets-courtesan trifle, Luhrmann’s film brilliantly evokes the intense, irrational, head-over-everything rush of true passion. Its best moments – the immortal star entrance of Nicole Kidman on a spangled trapeze, for example – are dizzy gasps of pure cinema. TH

Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix

Cast: Béatrice Dalle, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Gérard Darmon

Amour fou: the French invented the term and this shows you why. In her very first movie, the 21-year-old Béatrice Dalle delivered a career-defining performance which transcends mere pouting petulance to embody a wide-eyed, crockery-smashing, blade-wielding, bush-flashing rage to live. Struggling writer Anglade does his best to provide the unconditional affection she craves, but will anything be enough to quieten Betty’s inner torment?

Quintessentially French, quintessentially ’80s, as Diva auteur Beineix revels in an eye-popping palette of electric blues, neon yellows and lipstick crimson. Tellingly, it’s best experienced in the deliriously grandiloquent 186-minute director’s cut rather than the more familiar but deeply compromised two-hour release version, which struggles to make sense of Betty’s extreme psychology. TJ

Director: Mike Nichols

Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross

How romantic is The Graduate, really? Are we talking about the affair between Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) and Mrs Robinson (Bancroft), in which he’s driven by adolescent lust and gnawing boredom, and she by a desperate desire to revisit her youth, to feel something, anything for a change? Or do we mean the engagement between Benjamin and Mrs Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Ross), in which both characters appear to be marching through some sort of societally mandated courtship routine, without ever really meeting in the middle?

And yet, despite the cynicism and the ironic distance, despite that frankly terrifying closing shot of Ben and Elaine on the bus, miles distant, there’s still something bracing and heartfelt about The Graduate. Perhaps in showing us all this tragic emptiness, Nichols is encouraging us to confront it. TH

Director: François Truffaut

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre

Truffaut’s freewheeling tale of a menage à trois burns as brightly today as it did in 1962, tripping along on playful New Wave energy. Moreau is unforgettable as force of nature Catherine, who steals the hearts of two young writers in 1910s Paris. Catherine is Jules’s girl. She’s not beautiful or intelligent, but she is a real woman, he says. The three skip around Paris together. Life’s a holiday.

One night, as the two men spout nonsense about a Strindberg play, Catherine hurls herself into the Seine. She’s unpredictable like that. Later, when she switches allegiances to Jim, Jules can’t bear to be apart from her. Let Jim have her, but let her stay in his life. The years can’t dim the warmth or humanity of Truffaut’s third (and best) film. CC

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

Cast: Kazuo Hasegawa, Kyôko Kagawa

Adapted from an ancient Japanese fable, Chikamatsu Monogotari sees master director Kenji Mizoguchi prove his worth alongside the likes of Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy as an all-time master of the populist romantic tragedy. It’s the tale of a simple clerk, Mohei (Hasegawa), who does a slightly crooked but well-meant favour for the boss’s wife, Osan (Kagawa), and, in the ensuing fallout, is forced to go on the run with her, accused of adultery, for which the penalty in seventeenth-century Japan was public crucifixion.

So begins a thrilling, devastating journey through the hinterland, as the forces of propriety and tradition band together to frustrate the lovers’ happiness. Unabashedly sentimental but rich with meaning and subtle purpose, Mizoguchi’s film teaches us that one moment of reckless love is worth more than a lifetime of socially approved loneliness. TH

Director: Bill Forsyth

Cast: John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn, Clare Grogan

Opening with a crew of gawky hormone monsters crouched in the dark, spying on a nurse undressing in a window, Bill Forsyth’s sophomore film initially teases itself as a much different movie than it ends up being. Far from a Glaswegian Porky’s, it’s a sweet, low-key, gently funny comedy about learning to read the rhythms of your own heart. 

A supremely gangly John Gordon Sinclair, looking like a scarecrow with a shag haircut, is a nerdy yet self-determined teenager who develops a heavy insta-crush on the new girl in school (Hepburn), a soccer dynamo clearly more interested in the pitch than dating. Via some light trickery from those who know better – aka the other girls in school – he’s nudged in a different direction. It’s the rare guy’s-eye-view teen flick where, peeping tommery aside, sex is somewhat distant. Sometimes, all a boy really wants is just a nice girl to take a walk to the chip shop with. MS

Director: Marc Webb

Cast: Joseph Gordon Levitt, Zooey Deschanel

A post-modern post-mortem of love – or something like it – (500) Days Of Summer introduces us to Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a lady since invoked in countless discussions of that stock indie romcom character, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

A trainee architect working as a greetings card writer, Tom falls hard for the kooky charms of his boss’s new secretary, despite the advice of friends who warn him off and Summer herself, who tells him she doesn’t believe in love. Against all the odds, the couple bond over a shared affection for little-known balladeers The Smiths – and the rest is non-linear narrative history. CB

Director: Celine Song

Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

Many movie romances imply that love is divinely ordained – that there is some cosmic force propelling us ever forward to the person we’re fated to be with. In her debut feature, writer-director Celine Song argues that, more often, love is simply a matter of timing, and not everyone gets it right.

An air of melancholy hangs over this story of two childhood friends in Korea (played as adults by the wonderful Greta Lee and Teo Loo) who, over the course of two and a half decades, continually fall in and out and each other’s lives, never consummating (nor ever quite articulating) their true feelings for one another. But the film, described by Song as semi-autobiographical, is far too modest, gentle and human to register as tragic. Instead, it quietly acknowledges that, sometimes, it’s just the way life goes – and that an unrealised romance can be meaningful as one that actually comes to fruition. MS

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Bradford Dillman

‘Scattered pictures from the corners of my mind…’ Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyrics and Marvin Hamlisch’s melody proved an Oscar-winning combination, bolstering the already considerable star power which has long made this a mums’ favourite. Barbra Streisand is a bolshy, strident Jewish lefty, Redford a WASP prince out to further his own literary career. They seem like chalk and cheese, but such is the stuff of romantic sagas.

That said, the movie never seems quite sure whether it’s unabashed retro-styled escapism or a serious look at the currents of US politics leading to the cultural strife of the ’50s – though the studio’s slashing cuts to the McCarthy-era footage certainly tip it towards the former. Like the song says, ‘Misty watercolor memories, of the way we were’. TJ

Director: Taylor Hackford

Cast: Richard Gere, Deborah Winger, Louis Gossett Jr

Star Wars showed the movie business that audiences were ready for old-fashioned stories in shiny new packaging, and this mega-hit melodrama took a not-dissimilar approach. Old Hollywood might have pictured the local girl trying to keep her honour yet win the heart of a dashing navy recruit. Here, Richard Gere hogs the limelight as the would-be flyboy learning to love someone other than himself – while Debra Winger alternates good-girl and bad-girl moves.

It’s far from subtle, but certainly delivers more grit than a payload of weepy master Nicholas Sparks’ adaptations. And the big hit single made the image of uniformed Gere ubiquitous for a while – provided you could get goggle-eyed, windmill-armed vocalist Joe Cocker out of your mind. TJ

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable

Here it is, ground zero, the birth of the modern romantic comedy. Not that there hadn’t been romances before, some of them fairly amusing. But It Happened One Night was the one that codified the rules of engagement: mismatched lovers thrown together by circumstance; snappy, off-the-cuff repartee; grand, irrational gestures of devotion; endings so deliriously happy that nothing could ever go wrong again.

It had a troubled production – both Gable and Colbert found the script tasteless – but when the movie picked up all five major Academy Awards, their criticism understandably abated. It’s been endlessly remade (twice in Bollywood alone) and can count both Stalin and Hitler among its celebrity fans. But It Happened One Night remains the genius genesis moment for the romcom – and Hollywood has never looked back. TH

Director: George Cukor

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart

Look up ‘fizzy’ in a film dictionary and you’ll find a shot of Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord (no relation to the porn star), the snappy, snippy, self-regarding heroine of Cukor’s magnificent country house comedy.

Taking his cues from Shakespeare (it could comfortably have been retitled Much Ado About a Midsummer Night’s Shrew-Taming), playwright Philip Barry weaves a tangled web of delicious misunderstandings and deliberate misdemeanours as three mismatched men – sarky but self-improved ex-husband Grant, youthfully exuberant writer Stewart and dull, well-meaning fiancé John Howard – take it in turns to tilt at Hepburn’s hard-nosed heiress. And if there’s a sneaking suspicion at the end that she picked the wrong one – Four Weddings-style – that’s all part of the film’s restless, headspinning charm. TH

Director: Lukas Moodyson

Cast: Rebecca Liljeberg, Alexandra Dahlström, Erica Carlson

Romance and social transgression go hand in hand in Lukas Moodysson’s gorgeous and empathetic story of two high-school girls whose love affair scandalises the small Swedish town of Åmal. Concerns about distribution and awards probably explain why the original title – Fucking Åmal – got changed to the cosier and less confrontational Show Me Love. But in no other area does Moodysson compromise: the emotions are raw, the romance giddy, the truths it exposes impossible to ignore. TH

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed

Frank Capra’s festive favourite covers tragedy, comedy and, yes, romance, as loveable lunk James Stewart meets, woos, marries and starts a family with Donna Reed’s adorable small-town beauty Mary. Their life together has its ups and downs – Stewart does try to throw himself off a bridge, after all. But the film’s honest depiction of marriage as both a gift and a struggle is both honest and unexpectedly romantic. Oh, and their kids are bloody adorable, too – little Zuzu and her petals, especially. TH

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder

The scariest thing about Burton’s gothic fairy tale is reading the list of actors who were considered for the part of Edward, the man with scissors for hands created by a scientist. The studio insisted Burton meet Tom Cruise (who believed the story needed a ‘happier ending’). Michael Jackson badly wanted the part. Tom Hanks turned it down.

Finally, Burton got his way and cast Johnny Depp, who, like a Camden goth Charlie Chaplin, plays Edward with a dash of slapstick and sad-eyed loneliness (watch Edward’s scissor fingers twitch when he’s nervous). It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Depp and Burton, who’ve made seven films together since. Not such a happy ending for Depp and his co-star and then-girlfriend, Ryder. They split in 1993. CC

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains

A masterpiece? Undoubtedly. But romantic? Only if you’re a bit of a sicko. Hitchcock’s best and most brutal film – except for perhaps Vertigo – this wartime spy story centres on the efforts of American agent Cary Grant to persuade the daughter of a German operative (Ingrid Bergman) to meet and marry a Nazi boss (Claude Rains) – effectively prostituting herself for a greater cause. Of course, Grant and Bergman fall in love, leading to one of the most twisted, manipulative and unsettling romantic tales in cinema. It does, however, contain perhaps the all-time greatest screen kiss: a two-and-a-half-minute blast of raw eroticism that’ll make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. TH

Director: Leo McCarey

Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning

A playboy (Cary Grant) and a chanteuse (Deborah Kerr) fall in love on a transatlantic liner. Both are already attached but when they dock at New York, they agree to meet at the Empire State Building in six months’ time. Such is the set-up for one of Hollywood’s most imperishable romances, which Leo McCarey first directed in 1939 as Love Affair (starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne) and remade in 1957 as An Affair to Remember.

There’s another version, 1994’s Love Affair – a tepid showcase for Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. But as any fan of Sleepless in Seattle will tell you, the 1957 film is the most enduring, allowing Grant to play simmering passion beneath a debonair exterior, while Kerr suggests fervent yearning behind that reserved front. Hokey? Yes. Manipulative? Certainly. But we defy you not to blub like Meg Ryan. TJ

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant

Howard Hawks’ adaptation of the broadway hit The Front Page is the king of fast-talking, dapperly daffy screwball comedies. A hysterical chamber piece, the film unfurls as ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) attempts to leave her high-profile newspaper gig, only to be held hostage by her desire to break one more story… and the shady machinations of her equally verbose editor, Walter (Cary Grant), who also happens to be her ex-husband. 

The resulting fireworks between Grant and Russell are almost blinding. The film is a barrage of insults, chaotic turns of phrase, dry wit, and endless patter that shows the depth of the central relationship without taking a breath. Cary and Russell in turn perform their own flirtatious ballet of words, twisting syllables around one another’s delivery in a dance that’s teeming with sexual tension. But it’s in the rare moment that the two shut the hell up and simply share a longing glance that sells the relationship best. AK

Directors: Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise

Cast: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet may have made all the tweeners’ hearts melt (and scored a higher place on this list), but the real hep chicks and finger-poppin’ daddies know which version of Shakespeare’s play is the real leader of the pack.

West Side Story is like no other musical: sure, it’s sappy (‘Mariaaaaaaaaaa’) and slightly ridiculous, but it’s also brazenly political (‘if you’re all white in A-me-ri-ca!’), sneakily self-mocking (‘Hey, I got a social disease!’) and ferociously, aggressively emotional: the operatic finale is a masterclass in three-hanky audience manipulation. Also, the film contains perhaps the single best song ever written for the musical theatre: ‘Somewhere’, the ultimate romantic ballad for trapped and dreaming lovers. TH

Director: Jerry Zucker

Cast: Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze

By rights, a movie about a dead man trying to have one last shag with his wife before ascending into the light, directed by one-third of the team behind The Naked Gun and Airplane! shouldn’t jerk as many tears as this. Initially, screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin freaked out at the idea of Jerry Zucker overseeing his weepy supernatural drama, and somewhat understandably – on paper, it seems like an egregious mismatch of director and material.

But having a comedic genius at the helm turns out to be just what the movie needed. Without his leavening influence, the film would’ve likely turned out to be a maudlin eye-roller. Instead, it contains just enough farcical elements to make the romance work, despite its surface absurdity. (Whoopi Goldberg’s Oscar-nominated turn as conniving medium Oda Mae Brown certainly helped, too.) Sure, the sexy pottery scene is one of the most parodied movie moments of the ’90s. But anyone who doesn’t get a little misty when ‘Unchained Melody’ hits the chorus should check for a pulse. MS

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cast: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson

Narratively, not much happens in Sofia Coppola’s second feature. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are two lost souls adrift in the neon glow of Tokyo – he’s a washed-up old actor, she’s a twentysomething disillusioned with her newish marriage – who meet, dizzy with jetlag, in the lounge of the hotel where they’re both more or less waylaid. They get drinks. They talk. They sing karaoke. The sexual tension goes unresolved, though it was never throbbing to begin with. Then they part, probably forever. And yet, it feels like a great romance. Coppola does her part by shooting Tokyo as a gauzy, twinkling dreamscape. And Johansson and Murray both have hardly ever been better, communicating the subtle poignancy of their fleeting connection without ever saying it out loud. MS

Director: Garry Marshall

Cast: Richard Gere, Julia Roberts

Could a movie about a sex worker falling in love with a rich businessman get made today, as star Julia Roberts once questioned? Well, yeah: Anora, also centred on an escort swept off her feet by a wealthy client, came out in 2024, and won the Oscar for Best Picture. 

Only, in that case, the ultimate point is that fairy tales don’t come true in America. Pretty Woman, by contrast, is all fairy tale – Cinderella with boxy suits and big hair. Roberts is a brassy LA hooker hired by Richard Gere’s visiting millionaire to act as his nonsexual arm candy for the week. She crashes high society, is almost raped by Jason Alexander, and when she and Gere finally do have sex, it’s to consummate their genuine feelings for one another. Sure, this version of the story would probably get think-pieced to oblivion if it was released now. But as pure escapist fantasy, it’s still hard to resist. MS

Director: Andrew Haigh

Cast: Chris New, Tom Cullen

This British film, shot on a shoestring, captures in a lively and fresh style the first throes of attraction, passion and maybe even love between two men, Glen (New) and Russell (Cullen), who meet one night in a bar and spend a couple of days and nights together. They talk, they have sex, they size each other up. Glen is open and chatty, while Russell is more guarded and defensive. Haigh’s film is marked by an immediacy and a sense of tentative exploration that’s rare in depictions of couplings, and by a keen awareness that we project one image on the world and hold another back for ourselves. Not a great deal happens in terms of big events, but the film’s honesty and realism mean that it’s a little film with a lot to say. DC

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn

A stuffy paleontologist and a carefree socialite go on a road trip to deliver a domesticated leopard to the latter’s family farm. It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke. Instead, it’s the basis for one of the screwiest of all screwball comedies. 

Around a frenzied plot that also involves a lost brontosaurus bone, a naughty terrier and a second, angrier leopard, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn quip, bicker and flirt at director Howard Hawks’ signature ratatat pace. A flop upon release, the film was redeemed as a classic after years of television screenings, with Hepburn, in particular, more than beating the allegations that she was ever, as one exec said, ‘box-office poison’. She’s a sheer delight as a proto manic pixie dream girl teaching Grant’s uptight scientist a lesson in embracing chaos. Her giggle alone could change anyone’s life. MS

Director: Emile Ardolino

Cast: Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey

She dreamt of studying the economics of underdeveloped countries and volunteering for the Peace Corps. He just wanted to dance the night away. Until one day she manhandles some watermelons into his backstage area (not a metaphor), and falls in love at first sight.

Filmed at the peak of Patrick Swayze’s handsomeness, with a healthy dollop of none-more-’80s style and a cracking jukebox full of irresistibly catchy numbers, a thousand clip shows would have us remember Dirty Dancing as something of a minor classic. And, for once, they would be right on the money. CB

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray

Romance isn't the first thing you expect from a Wes Anderson film, but in this delightful 1960s-set tale, the American auteur employs all his usual tricks – hip soundtrack, arch dialogue, super-careful production design – in the service of a story about the chaos and madness of young love.

Sam and Suzy are 12-year-olds on the run. Suzy is precocious and independent; Sam is nerdy and serious. They don't get very far, but a mile's a long way when you're 12, and danger is never far away. What's lovely is how seriously Anderson takes Sam and Suzy's adventure, while also laying on the humour and the irony. By the time the pair steal a smooch on a deserted beach, we're totally smitten. DC

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart

You can’t blame a great film for the indignities it spawned. The Shop Around the Corner was the inspiration behind both Are You Being Served? and gooey romcom You’ve Got Mail, but that doesn’t dim the brilliance of Lubitsch’s original.

We tend to think of pre-war Hollywood as being a fairly insular, conservative sort of place. But here’s a mainstream comedy set in Hungary (already an Axis collaborator by the time the film was shot), pushing the idea that those benighted Europeans – a world away from middle America – had ordinary lives, loves and values of their own. The performances are perfect, the hate-to-love plotline painstakingly constructed, and the dialogue sparkles like diamonds. TH

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio

Few films inspire as much passion as James Cameron’s epic would-be folly. Following a troubled production, when the film finally splashed into cinemas, it became the biggest money-spinner of all time, provoking an ocean of housewives’ tears and one of the biggest Oscar hauls in history. Then the backlash hit, like an iceberg in Arctic waters: wait a second, people pointed out, the dialogue’s godawful, the depiction of social class is farcical, and the romance is just join-the-dots Mills and Boon nonsense.

So which is true? Well, both, to be fair. Titanic is an incredibly involving experience, especially once the ship hits the berg and all hell breaks loose. Sure, it’s about as intellectually valid as a Jilly Cooper novel, but if you’re looking for a high-concept crowd-pleaser with its heart firmly on its sleeve, they don’t come much bigger, sillier or more enjoyable. TH

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe

‘I will find you!’ With these words, bellowed to his beloved (Madeleine Stowe) as she’s hauled off by rampaging Native American braves, Daniel Day-Lewis secured his position as the ultimate thinking woman’s crumpet. Michael Mann’s epic frontier romp has battles, scalpings, chases, grand landscapes and very, very long guns. But it’s the soaring central love story that makes the film sing: this is an old-school romance, all lingering glances and bold declarations, petticoats, pouting and heaving machismo. And it’s glorious. TH

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg

As love stories go, Breathless' ('À Bout de Souffle is not one for the ages. Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing a Parisian wideboy on the run after shooting a cop, and Jean Seberg as the hipster American newspaper girl who unwittingly shelters him, look impossibly beautiful together, smoking Lucky Strikes and debating existentialist theory in bed. But they seem entirely too cool to be in love.

Yet Godard’s groundbreaking New Wave take on the Hollywood B-movie is romantic almost in spite of itself. Its still-youthful jazz rhythms, its fresh exploration of Paris at its most invitingly chic and its sexy bedroom talk are what so many of us want romance to look and feel like. So we’re more than happy to indulge it, like the cinematic equivalent of a dirty weekend. GL

Director: Douglas Sirk

Cast: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson

The swooning Technicolor palette, the pristine costumes and the fairly standard odd-couple romance between a rich widow, Cary (Wyman), and a Thoreau-reading gardener, Ron (Hudson), only serve to make the social commentary in Sirk’s film all the more powerful.

All That Heaven Allows is a blistering exposé of how society’s attitudes serve to throw cold water on passion and keep our purer romantic instincts in check. Scenes of folk gossiping behind the couple’s backs or predatory men leaping on Cary are shocking and only make us root even more for Cary and Ron’s relationship (even if the film lacks a genuine spark between the pair).

The film proved an inspiration for two later inquiring romances, Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, both of which took Sirk’s interest in sexual repression and love-across-the-divide in very different directions. DC

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cast: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem

Many of cinema’s most exciting moments come about as a result of unlikely juxtapositions. Who would’ve thought that taking the structure and form of 1950s Hollywood ‘womens’ pictures’ and transplanting them to grim, urban 1970s Germany would result in one of the sweetest, most challenging and emotive romantic films ever made?

Mira plays Emmi, the solitary, spreading middle-aged cleaner who starts an affair with a Moroccan ‘gastarbeiter’ two decades her junior. What’s remarkable about Fassbinder’s film is that he takes these two diametric characters and makes their love completely convincing – not for a second do we wonder why the strapping Ali cares so much for crumbling Emmi, or vice versa. TH

Director: Barry Jenkins

Cast: Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali

The lingering sense of lives left unfulfilled permeates Moonlight, even if the film, directed by Barry Jenkins, does end on a somewhat positive note. Set in a barely recognisable yet unsettlingly realistic Miami, the film’s portrayal of the three stages of main character Chiron’s life, from boyhood to adulthood, thrums with pain, tenderness and understanding. The complexities of his situation and his internal and external crisis of masculinity are sharply matched and cut down by moments of kindness, Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe both deliver heartfelt performances. The burgeoning – and conflicted – relationship between Chiron and Kevin is the sort of romance that, while filled with strife, is also overrun with possibility. There’s plenty of tough stuff in it, but you can’t help but walk away from this one feeling a bit warm and fuzzy. AK

Director: Anthony Minghella

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas

Elaine from Seinfeld’s rant against The English Patient essentially destroyed Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-guzzler for a generation of viewers – making it become a byword for lengthy, handsomely sluggish prestige cinema. But watch it again, and you’ll see how undeserved that reputation is. Deftly adapting Michael Ondaatje’s novel of passion, grief and regret at either end of World War II, Minghella translated the novel’s lyrical prose into extra-sensory visual language. It’s the rare screen romance with a vivid sense of touch, of skin caressed, between both Ralph Fiennes’s and Kristin Scott Thomas’s desert lovers, and Juliette Binoche and Naveen Andrews’s worn, disconsolate drifters of war. And whatever Elaine says, that cave tryst and tragic farewell still makes many of us misty all over. History appears to be coming around, too: a miniseries based on Ondaatje’s book is being developed for the BBC. GL

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Louis Trintignant

The saddest film on this list is Michael Haneke’s portrait of the end of a marriage, as Parisians Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) face the inevitability of parting after almost a lifetime together. But while its central concern may be death, Haneke’s drama isn’t depressing. Amour is a film about the connections between people, and how those bonds are the thing that makes life worth living. The performances are flawless, the script is razor-sharp and insightful. This might be the perfect heartbreaker. TH

Director: John Huston

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart

We tend to think of movies about old folks shacking up as being a modern phenomenon, as producers pursue the newfangled ‘grey pound’. But it’s really nothing new: in fact, when the original script for The African Queen was presented to the censors, the busybodies were shocked at the idea of two unmarried persons enjoying a late-in-life romance in the sweaty confines of a rickety old tramp steamer.

The African Queen is one of the great films about delayed self-discovery: brittle spinster Hepburn’s realisation of her love for crusty, good-hearted layabout Bogart isn’t just believable, it feels completely necessary. Wise, warm, witty, and with just the hint of a sly, subversive twinkle in its eye, The African Queen is old-school Hollywood at its absolute finest. TH

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke

Nine years after the tantalisingly open ending of Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater revisits the couple who crackled with such chemistry in 1995 to see where life has taken the thirty-something versions of Jesse and Celine. This time, actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy not only played but also co-wrote their parts, and the result is that rare sequel that betters the original.

Plausibly seasoned by life’s knocks but unwilling to let go of a deeply ingrained romanticism, this Jesse and Celine are older, wiser and – just maybe – more suited to each other. Will they let go and make that leap into love? The question presses harder as the film’s fleeting 80-minute runtime slips past with a resolution apparently no closer. CB

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes

Baz Luhrmann had some cast-iron source material to work with in the form of Shakespeare’s story – but the Australian writer-director took the playwright’s romantic tragedy to another place entirely with this ultra-modern reworking. At the same, he never lost sight of the essence of Shakespeare’s tale of two young lovers doomed from the first time they lay eyes on each other.

The moment that Romeo (DiCaprio, so young!) and Juliet (Danes, so young too!) meet at a wild fancy-dress party is pure bliss to watch, just as Luhrmann’s staging of the final death scene is almost impossible to bear. There are guns, hip-hop, open-topped cars and characters so larger-than-life that the whole thing now, in retrospect, feels like Tarantino directing a season-finale episode of Dynasty. It’s mad, musical and immensely moving. DC

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, Annie Corley

This classy adaptation of Robert James Waller’s bestseller is Brief Encounter in another time and another place. It’s mid-‘60s Iowa and Italian housewife Streep, long wedded to a local farmer, starts thinking about the life she could have had when dashing National Geographic photographer Clint turns up to shoot the famed covered bridges nearby.

While the latterday framing device is somewhat clunky, the central middle-aged romance is exquisitely inscribed through tender looks, stolen moments, and much sultry jazz on the radio, building to a wrenchingly bittersweet conclusion that love’s liberating affirmation doesn’t always arrive when circumstances allow it to flourish. ‘This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime’ is the key line, and we believe it. Sigh. TJ

Director: Jacques Demy

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo

You'd need to have a sliver of ice lodged in your heart not to be moved by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – a musical that has even hardened musical-haters melting into puddles. Not that it’s a musical in the belt-‘em-out tradition. Instead, every word is sung rather than spoken as 17-year-old Geneviève (Deneuve) falls sweetly and madly in love with car mechanic Guy (Castelnuovo).

Umbrellas is one of the most ravishing films ever made, wrapped in candyfloss colours to match the blush of first love. When Guy is drafted to fight in Algeria, Geneviève is certain she will die of grief. But time passes and Geneviève doesn’t die. Love fades. And that’s the bittersweet message inside this exquisitely sugar-coated pill. CC

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke

Proof that you don’t need a plot to fall in love, Before Sunrise sees strangers on a train Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet-cute, disembark in Vienna, and dance a verbal tango into the night as the deadline of Jesse’s flight home looms.

You’d say that Delpy and Hawke have never been better were it not for the 2004 sequel Before Sunset, which shows us what happens next, and the 2013 instalment Before Midnight, which revisits the pair as middle age encroaches. A classy antidote to the notion that passion is purely physical, it’s the sporadically articulate philosophising and spiky gender-focused sparring that glues these two chatterboxes together. CB

Directors: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson

Cast: Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer

While most of the discourse surrounding Pixar’s Up rightly centers on the emotionally transcendent opening moments, the film is so much more than than its heartrending prologue. Though wife Ellie is gone within 15 crushing minutes, she looms over the further adventures of curmudgeonly widower Carl Fredricksen, providing him with the spark needed to see the world in the most unconventional way possible. Carl’s love for Ellie drives the film even in her absence, pushing the old grump to fulfill her earthly wishes and open his hardened heart. In a way, the entirety of Up is a posthumous romance, and by the time Carl finds one last love letter from Ellie written from her deathbed – right before the film pivots to canine-piloted dogfights, no less – viewers will be fully invested in one of family cinema’s most complex, nimbly told love stories. 

Director: Leos Carax

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge) is Leos Carax's valentine to amour fou, Paris and his then-partner Juliette Binoche. And it's as rapturous and irrational as true love itself. Even the story of its production is something of a romantic tragedy: three years in the making and spiralling wildly over budget as Carax reconstructed Paris’s iconic Pont-Neuf Bridge in the south of France, it's the kind of grand artistic expression that must fail in order to succeed.

The simple love story – between two bohemian bums, one a derelict fire-eater and one a painter losing her eyesight – could be the stuff of silent melodrama, but Carax crams it with sound and colour to the point of delirious sensory ecstasy. GL

Director: FW Murnau

Cast: George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

The shift in attitudes over time can make old movies unexpectedly shocking: we expect attitudes to race and gender roles to be different. But Sunrise is a film in which a man attempts, fairly brutally, to strangle his wife – and yet by the end she (and we) have completely forgiven him.

Murnau’s masterpiece remains one of the most visually impressive films ever shot. And it’s in the disparity between that visual splendor and the intimacy of the central couple that the film’s power lies: as the quote above stresses, this is a film about anyone, and everyone. The sets and actions in the story may be big, Shakespearian, and occasionally unbelievable, but the emotions are close, human, familiar – ‘small’ in the best possible sense. TH

Director: Jean Vigo

Cast: Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, Michel Simon

The French are famed as a romantic nation, but for those of us raised in a more reserved culture, their occasional tendency towards sweaty-crotched Gitane-smoke-in-the-face Gainsbourg-isms can seem a little, well, aggressive. Not so L’Atalante: this is a love story with the lightest touch, managing to be spiritual, sensual, serious and strange all at the same time.

Its 29-year-old director famously died before his debut feature was completed, but there’s more in this one film than most directors manage in a lifetime: more meaning, more emotion, more intensity. Perhaps it’s the out-of-the-past setting – a narrowboat plying the canals of rural France – or the weirdly disconnected central couple, or even the presence of Simon’s crusty, irascible Pere Jules. But something in Vigo’s film is not quite of this earth, and to watch it is the closest we may ever come to experiencing someone else’s dreams. TH

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep

There’s so much in Manhattan that’s familiar from Woody Allen’s other films, not least Woody himself playing a writer, Isaac, with endless hang-ups and a variety of women in his life. Here, those women are his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tracy (Hemingway); another love interest, Mary (Keaton); and his ex-wife, Jill (Streep).

For Woody, romance is fluid, complicated and alive. Yet by far the biggest romance in Manhattan is Woody’s affair with the city itself. New York is often the backdrop for Woody’s films, but here a sense of place is more important than ever. There are those famous montages of the Manhattan skyline, lent a rare beauty by Gordon Willis’ loving black-and-white photography, and at the film’s climax we see Isaac running through the streets that have shaped him – and Woody Allen – and continue to do so. DC

Director: Tony Scott

Cast: Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette

There are few more blatant examples of personal wish fulfillment in the movies than Quentin Tarantino’s script for True Romance. A comic store clerk and exploitation movie nerd (hey, write what you know) meets a gorgeous, sweet-natured hooker who immediately falls madly in love with him. They head off on the run, taking in all the sights from Hollywood directors to bloodthirsty gangsters, all the while exchanging dynamic repartee and having great sex.

It’s thanks to Scott’s unwillingness to indulge the script’s excesses that True Romance works as well as it does: avoiding both smugness and sentiment, this is a breeze of a film, coasting on terrific dialogue, charming performances, pacy plotting and sheer, coke-fuelled joie de vivre. Sure, it’s a teensy bit shallow, but damn it’s entertaining. TH

Director: Jean Cocteau

Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day

The miracle of La Belle et la Bête is how its tricks are still so magical – even in today’s age of CGI. Director Cocteau was a poet first and foremost and he brings to the traditional Beauty and the Beast fairy tale pure movie poetry: Belle crying tears of diamonds; the castle lit by disembodied human arms holding up candelabras. It’s unforgettable, although you might side with Greta Garbo on the ending. Legend has it that when she watched La Belle with Cocteau she cried out at the end, as the curse is lifted and Beast is restored to his princely self: ‘Where is my beautiful Beast?’ Garbo, like Belle, had fallen for the matinee idol Beast – and the smarmy-looking prince left in his place doesn’t quite cut it. CC

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern

No one does romance quite like David Lynch: just think of Sandy and the robins in Blue Velvet, or Henry and the radiator lady in Eraserhead. There are those who write him off as an ironist, but this uniquely intense and unabashed worship of love as an otherworldly, all-consuming and dangerous state of higher consciousness is anything but detached.

Lynch loves love, and he loves lovers, none more so than Sailor and Lula, the star-crossed, whisky-fuelled, sex-crazed, emotionally scarred couple that are the wild heart of his madcap kaleidoscopic road movie. This is all-American love reimagined as a carnival show: brutal and beautiful and completely barmy. TH

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar

Based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman and with an Oscar-winning screenplay written by James Ivory (yes, of Merchant Ivory heritage), Call Me by Your Name is more than just a bittersweet meditation on the enduring impact of a summer romance.

Director Luca Guadagnino captures the confusion, simmering lust and crackling tension between precocious and thoughtful 17-year-old Elio (Chalamet) and the allure of the older, magnetic and dashingly handsome Oliver (Hammer). Elio’s obsessive nature and infantile arrogance, as well as his fraught desires, are captured so vividly that, regardless of whether or not you’ve ended up screwing a slightly older man in your parents’ summer house in northern Italy, it still feels oddly recognisable and nostalgic. The stirring monologue delivered by Elio’s father (Stuhlbarg) about the necessity of pain and heartbreak throbs with empathy, as does the film’s final scene of Elio sitting in front of the hearth weeping. It’s a gentle and devastating coming-of-age romance that’ll leave you aching (and ready to book a holiday to Italy). AK

Director: Max Ophüls

Cast: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan

Letter from an Unknown Woman is about the death of love, a yearning so intense that the heart breaks into pieces. From one point of view, the film has no place on this list: love turns to loss, hope to despair. But, in a way, isn’t unrequited love the purest kind, with none of that dirty reality and compromise getting in the way?

If that’s true, then this might be the most romantic film of all, a story of reckless, undimmed, lifelong passion, against all odds and common sense. It’s the peak of Ophüls’s career as a visual stylist. As the camera swoops and swoons, as the characters waltz and wander through high-ceilinged ballrooms and jangling cafes, it’s impossible not to be drawn, like the heroine, into this dream of impossible infatuation. TH

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast: Wendy Hillier, Roger Livesey

The simplest and most loveable of all Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s collaborations, I Know Where I'm Going! is the tale of a headstrong English lass (Wendy Hiller), who heads north to marry the laird of a remote Scottish island. When she’s trapped on the mainland by rough seas, she finds herself falling for crotchety naval officer Roger Livesey. Screenwriter Pressburger and director Powell create a wistful world of quiet magic and soulful, folkish romance. TH

Director: Victor Fleming

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable

Endlessly quoted, referenced and parodied, this Golden Age behemoth is such a vast cultural object that many people forget how purely immersive it is as human drama. The romance between feisty Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara and old-world playboy Rhett Butler is perhaps not as romantic as its reputation suggests (the affair is initiated and finally undone by their shared, steely pride in themselves). But underneath its glorious spectacle, Gone with the Wind is a surprisingly modern and cynically spiked study of two people who may be too perfect for each other. We shouldn’t want Scarlett and Rhett to work things out a badly as we do, yet we swoon with them at every turn. GL

Director: Andrew Stanton

Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin

Can a near-silent portrait of a love between two robots, WALL-E and Eve, really be that romantic? Well, Pixar found a way with this daring story of a lonely robot on Earth in 2700, a time when the planet has been abandoned by life and WALL-E has only piles of junk and a copy of Gene Kelly’s Hello, Dolly! for company. WALL-E is a creaky, awkward creature and when the more sleek, iPod-like Eve turns up in his life, he naturally falls head over heels for her.

The film’s great achievement (if we forget its more boisterous and less successful second half) is that its silence and calm draw us in and allows us to appreciate small gestures and the little things in life. It’s the most touching robot-on-robot relationship since the bickering bromance between C3PO and R2D2. DC

How lovely it is to see Anderson’s unsettling, unpredictable, completely unique romantic comedy in the top ten. Descending from the emotionally draining dramatic heights of Magnolia, Anderson micro-sized his world, zooming down to two characters adrift in a dream of love, escaping reality through one another.

Well before Uncut Gems, Sandler proves definitively that he can act as the frustrated-to-the-point-of-mania white-collar warehouse worker who falls – truly, madly, weirdly – for Watson’s fragile jetsetter. ‘It felt like a free gift from a guy who called me up and said, “I wrote you a movie’,” Sandler said of the film on its 20th anniversary in 2022. ‘When that happens, it’s incredible. You’re just like, “Okay, man, thanks.” I knew it was different.’ The result is a gloriously unhinged and mesmerising film, a window into another world, where gravity isn’t quite as powerful and the regular rules – about romance, family, work, aggression, competition entries – don’t seem to apply. TH

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal, Carrie Fisher, Bruno Kirby

The great Nora Ephron’s finest hour as a writer, this examination of the sometimes thin line between platonic and romantic love makes no secret of its debt to Woody Allen – at certain points in Meg Ryan’s outfits are practically identical to Annie Hall’s. Yet Ephron earns the reference point with a script as sagely hilarious as – and arguably more heartfelt than – the Woodster’s best relationship studies, mapping the shifting attitudes and affections of the title characters’ long-term friendship with unfailing wisdom and affection for their foibles. All that, and it has a handful of individual gags for the ages, including – I needn’t even quote it – the one that gave countless men lifelong doubt over their own sexual prowess. GL

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine

In the span of five years, Billy Wilder made three of the all-time great romantic comedies, but with the third, he upended not just his previous efforts but the genre as a whole. Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot were irreverent for their time, though very much screwball affairs. The Apartment was something else – darker, more scathing, yet also more romantic and perhaps even funnier at the same time.

Jack Lemmon is a white-collar pushover lending out his flat to the higher-ups at his office so they can carry out their extramarital trysts. The promise of a promotion keeps him smiling through the inconvenience – until his crush (Shirley MacLaine at maximum cuteness) shows up with his slimebag boss (Fred MacMurray). A deep sadness runs throughout – the plot hinges on a suicide attempt, bold for 1960 – building to a sweet-and-sour conclusion encapsulated by the film’s final line: ‘Shut up and deal.’ MS

Director: Hal Ashby

Cast: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort

The hippy era was full of movies that attempted to confront square society, to shock viewers into some undefined form of action. How many of them are still effective today? But ‘Harold and Maude’, the gentle flipside of the revolutionary dream, is every bit as charming, affecting and surprising as it must have been on its first release.

Partly this is because none of its themes have gone out of date: we still live in a world of empty privilege and rigid hierarchy, petty authority and relentless conformism. So the idea of a teenage boy (Cort) shacking up with a batty old woman (Gordon) is still a challenge to social norms. Best of all, Harold and Maude is also still devastatingly romantic: a story of soulmates, in the most literal sense. TH

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Diane Keaton, Woody Allen

Irrational, crazy and absurd, Annie Hall gives us love in its all its messy glory. It’s the anatomy of break-up. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ asks Woody Allen’s neurotic comedian Alvy Singer after his split from scatterbrain singer Annie (Diane Keaton, enjoying a killer fashion moment in boyish slacks and a fedora).

Allen has said that ‘Annie Hall’ was his first film to go ‘deeper’. And at its heart is the sad message that finding your soulmate doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Or, as an old woman tells Alvy: ‘Love fades.’ But for all that, Annie Hall is hands down the most hilarious film ever made about love, hysterically funny and packed with gags. CC

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast: Kim Hunter, David Niven, Roger Livesey

Trust Powell and Pressburger to find a way of exploring love that is teasing, heartfelt and totally imaginative – while also being timely for an audience recovering from six years of war, separation and strain. When Niven’s pilot plunges to the ground, we enter two worlds: one of them celestial (in monochrome) and one of them real (in colour), although the distinction is in fact much more playful. After narrowly cheating death (or did he?), will Niven remain on Earth with his new love, Hunter? Or must he succumb to fate? In the end, Powell and Pressburger’s idea is age-old and simple: love conquers all. But they explain this with the bonkers-brilliant concept of putting this idea on trial in no less than a heavenly court. The climax couldn’t be more stirring. ‘It has an emotional impact that's tied to the fullness of experience,’ says Powell and Pressburger superfan Martin Scorsese, who narrated the 2024 documentary Made in England, ‘the beauty of life on Earth.’ DC

Director: Michel Gondry

Cast: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet

You might see this extraordinary film, a joint career peak for Michel Gondry, writer Charlie Kaufman and its improbably but perfectly matched leads, described in generic DVD catalogues as a romantic comedy. It’s a term that seems wholly unequal to its dizzying conceptual acrobatics, not to mention the profound sadness in its absurdist excavation of post-romantic trauma.

But a rich, tragedy-tinged comedy it is: Kaufman has essentially given a scruffy sci-fi makeover to a Philadelphia Story-style farce of second chances and destiny denied, without letting the film’s beating screwball heart get overly chilled by its wintry New York cool. No longer just the hipster’s choice – Ariana Grande named her chart-topping 2024 album after it – it’s become the go-to love story for an entire generation of, to paraphrase Kate Winslet’s Clementine, fucked-up girls – and guys – looking for their own peace of mind. GL

Director: Michael Curtiz

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into his. Humphrey Bogart’s choice between the woman he loves and doing the honourable thing is one of the most wrenching you’ll ever see on screen. Seventy years on, it gets the heart racing every time.

Bogey is Rick, a hard-drinking American in Casablanca, a city full of refugees fleeing the Nazis. Most of them wash up in Rick’s bar, including his great lost love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). With her is a Czech Resistance leader who’s escaped a concentration camp.

Casablanca is full of famous lines – though not the oft-misquoted ‘Play it again, Sam’, which is actually ‘Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake’ –  but my favourite is Rick’s description of himself heartbroken and abandoned on a train platform: ‘a guy standing in the rain with a comical look on his face, because his insides are kicked out.’ CC

Director: Ang Lee

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway

Damn, Heath Ledger. Newly plucked from shallow teen-heartthrob-dom, Ledger was just beginning to explore his own remarkable potential when his career was brutally cut short. But between the unhinged mania of The Dark Knight and his heartbreakingly composed turn here, we get some measure of the possibilities. And Brokeback Mountain is, at heart, a film about possibilities, and the different ways they’re crushed and crippled by an uncaring world. Ang Lee’s film could so easily have been a polemic, a film painstakingly designed to play on prejudice. Instead it plays mercilessly with the heartstrings – there are few more honest depictions of stifled love in cinema. ‘Repressed characters, I suppose, those stories attract me,’ Lee said in 2024. ‘Brokeback Mountain is just so beautiful. You’ve read the short story [by Annie Proulx]. I have nothing in common with Wyoming gay cowboys. But why did I cry? It’s haunting. It’s just a beautiful story.’ TH

Director: Wong Kar-Wai

Cast: Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung

Did you know that in the year 2000, Wong Kar-Wai invented the colour red? And rain? And the concept of quiet yearning? And cheongsam dresses? He didn’t, of course, but like the most transcendent romances, watching the director’s irrefutable masterpiece can feel as if you’re experiencing the world for the first time. 

Indeed, few films have ever been so visually sensual – ironic, perhaps, given that it’s a movie about unfulfilled desire. Two neighbours in 1960s Hong Kong discover their respective partners are sleeping with each other. Drawn together by their shared betrayal, they consider an affair of their own, before deciding it would be uncouth. ‘For us to do the same thing’, they argue, ‘would mean we are no better than they are’. Of course, that reasoning does nothing to extinguish their longing for one another. Wong uses everything at his disposal, from the colour palette to the wardrobe to the natural incandescence of his stars, to beautify their repressed emotions, but the ache is palpable. It’s a feast for the eyes that leaves a bruise on the heart. MS

Director: David Lean

Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard

You’d think that Lean’s tale of stiff-upper-lip emotion would be frightfully and unwatchably old-fashioned today. A married woman falls in love with a married man and they do the decent thing. And…? Unlike Casablanca, the future of civilisation isn’t hanging on the outcome. Just the happiness of two families. And not to mince words, they’re an unglamorous pair.

She’s Laura (Johnson), a not especially pretty housewife. He’s Alec (Howard), an earnest doctor. So why do we continue to find Lean’s much-loved classic so unbearably moving? Because it’s still thrilling to watch the continents of emotion beneath Laura and Alec’s icy properness. Celia Johnson is like a silent movie star with her huge eyes, showing so much emotion with barely a rustle of an eyelash.

Adapted from a Noël Coward play, Brief Encounter is a brilliantly crafted film, beginning with a goodbye in a railway café – the end of an affair that never really was. From there, Lean flashes back to the lovers’ first meeting in the same café. Laura has grit in her eye. Alec gallantly removes it. Later, they run into each other in a restaurant. They have luncheon (this is the 1930s), take a trip to the cinema, drive in the countryside. He borrows a flat for the afternoon for them to meet in, but embarrassment takes over and they don’t make love.

It’s all so very innocent. We listen to her innermost thoughts – as she narrates a kind of an imaginary confession to her sweet but dull husband: ‘I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.’ Laura and Alec know in their heart of hearts that leaving their families and running off together will not make a happy ending. And so they must part. He accepts a job in South Africa. Our hearts stop with the lovers’ when a busybody crashes their last few precious minutes together. Unforgettable. CC