It’s February, which means red heart balloons, oversized boxes of chocolates in shop windows and Celine Dion soaring over mall speakers. At the movies this week Dion is making a comeback thanks to the unnecessary re-release of the most sentimental, big screen 1990s romantic blockbuster Titanic, on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary. If James Cameron’s bittersweet, overlong epic isn't your cup of iceberg tea, there are films out there on streaming platforms that offer a subtler take on love — the obsession of humanity’s cultural production since we started telling stories. Here are some titles to warm or break your heart in the commercially mandated “month of love”.
SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS — YouTube
German director FW Murnau gave early cinema several masterpieces before his death in a car accident at the age of 42. This sweeping melodrama about a farmer who's led down the path of temptation by a vampy city woman, only to realise too late, that he loves his wife, remains a classic. It still confounds and intrigues with its ahead-of-its-time visual effects, which give the film a dreamy, surreal quality. It remains one of silent cinema’s most beautiful creations and created the mould for romantic dramas.
WITHIN OUR GATES — Mubi.com
African-American silent film pioneer Oscar Micheaux was a multi-hyphenate creative talent; a successful author, publisher and filmmaker who managed, against the odds in segregated America, to produce more than 40 films. Sadly, most were lost but this, his second film from 1920, remains to demonstrate his skill as a director of politically potent melodrama. Made five years after DW Griffith’s lauded but racist epic Birth of a Nation, it tells a heartbreaking love story under the painful restrictions imposed on black people in white America. It offers an early, powerful critique of the physical, psychological and economic repression of the era that resonates more than a century later.
LOVE AFFAIR — Mubi.com
Leo McCarey made his name as the director of fast-talking, slapstick Marx Brothers' comedies but this short, sharp, well-acted love story from 1939 is a classic. Starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, it’s the story of a European playboy and a sceptical, wisecracking woman who meet and develop an instant liking while travelling on a boat making the Atlantic crossing. They are involved with other people but promise to meet six months later at the top of the Empire State building. Fate, however, has other plans. Carefully directed, it’s influenced countless love stories.
CASABLANCA — Rent or buy from Apple TV +
One of the most adulated and emulated love stories in movie history, Michael Curtiz’s wartime melodrama remains a classic. Humphrey Bogart was never as good as he was here as the cynical, Casablanca Café owner Rick, whose icy heart melts when he’s reunited with Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa, the woman he left behind in Paris, years ago. It pulls at the heartstrings and leaves you grabbing for the tissues at its perfect, if not romantically successful, conclusion. It has some of the most memorable supporting characters and quotable lines in movie history.
VERTIGO — Rent or buy from Apple TV +
Recently dethroned from its number one spot on the Sight and Sound poll of the best films of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece remains a brilliant, cynical and visually ingenious psychological thriller about obsession and the lengths that those in love will sometimes go to manipulate each other. James Stewart’s neurotic, traumatised former cop turned detective becomes embroiled in a plot that will see him watch a mysterious woman kill herself. Years later he becomes convinced that another woman is her spitting image. He attempts to make amends by turning her into a version of the woman he failed to save. Hitchcock is at the peak of his powers here and the film builds to a slow and terrible climax in its creepy contemplation of how guilt and obsession make for horrible bedfellows when it comes to matters of the heart.
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR — Mubi.com
Alain Resnais's 1959 debut, written by Marguerite Duras, is an elegant mix of love story, politics and existential angst set against the backdrop of the site of the atomic bomb blast where a French woman and a Japanese man fall in love. As they explore each other, they reveal the details of their wartime pasts. It’s a moving exploration of the role of memory in shaping the present that asks whether love really can free us from our past sins.
THE APARTMENT — Rent or buy from Apple TV +
Billy Wilder’s 1960 masterpiece was considered risqué for its time because of its frank, sharply satirical examination of the accepted, unspoken fact of adultery in modern American middle-class male life. Jack Lemmon gives the greatest of his everyman Wilder performances as CC Baxter, the hapless lowly insurance clerk who’s willing to do anything to get ahead, including letting his amoral bosses use his apartment for trysts with their mistresses. When he meets the sad, neglected “other woman”, Fran, Baxter he realises that this easily accommodated male chauvinist practice has real casualties. In an effort to woo her, he begins to fight back. Part satirical comedy, part moving drama and part romantic comedy — it’s one of Wilder’s best achievements.
JULES AND JIM — Mubi.com
François Truffaut’s 1961 love triangle drama remains one of the French New Wave pioneer’s most energetic and enjoyable films. Set in the world of bohemian Paris in the years before the onset of World War 1, it’s the story of two young poets — one French and one German — who become infatuated with a beautiful older woman in a taboo-busting arrangement that will change their lives. It’s a tender mix of joyous life and harsh romantic reality that’s held together by the free-spirited performance by Jean Seberg and Truffaut’s lively direction.
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES — Mubi.com
Moe than half a century later, Nagisa Ōshima’s film is one of cinema’s most erotically charged and explicit love stories that stands as a chilling warning about the madness love can inspire. Based on a true story, it’s the tale of the obsessive and lethal relationship between a prostitute and the husband of the madam of the brothel she works in. Their relationship begins as a boundary-pushing sexual exploration but degenerates into a dark mess of betrayal and jealousy which results in deadly consequences when passion is taken to its limits.
MOONSTRUCK — Rent or buy from Apple TV +
An uplifting love story about an older Italian-American woman (Cher) who, as she’s about to be “taken off the shelf” thanks to a proposal from a well-meaning, solidly employed Italian-American man of her own age, finds herself falling hard for his darkly handsome, strange younger brother (Nicolas Cage). Norman Jewison’s empathetic feeling for the quirks and charms of the family at the film’s centre remains unbeaten.
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY — Rent or buy from Apple TV +
Directed by Rob Reiner and written by Nora Ephron, this is still the original charming, sharp-witted romantic comedy that set the tone for a deluge of similar films. Full of smart, eminently quotable one-liners and set pieces and anchored by the likable performances of stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal it’s the ultimate middle class New York love story.
THE THREE COLORS TRILOGY — Mubi.com
Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s three films about the multilayered complexities of love remain some of the finest explorations of the subject on screen. They’re smart, sexy, sometimes funny and emotionally devastating in their examinations of the confounding emotional and psychological ebbs and flows of relationships in the fast changing world of modern Europe in the 1990s.
THE ENGLISH PATIENT — Rent or buy from Apple TV +
The other, sweeping historical love story from the Titanic era, Anthony Minghella’s visually stunning adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel, is the better epic melodrama by miles. Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche star in the World War 2 set drama about a badly burned pilot who, as he lies dying from the injuries sustained in a plane crash, remembers to his nurse, his passionate, tragic affair with the wife of an English officer in North Africa. Beautifully executed with a particular flair for the dreaminess of the romantic drama, it’s a big scale, big screen film that transports you on its sentimental three-hour journey into the past.
CAROL — Showmax
Todd Haynes’s lush period drama about forbidden love between two American women in the 1950s offers a gut-wrenching portrait of desire and the crushing repressions of conservative post-war society. It’s carried by superlative performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as the doomed lovers on a brief but unforgettable journey that will exhilarate and destroy them.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME — Showmax
Timothée Chalamet made his name and Armie Hammer briefly shone in this melancholic drama about first love in the beautiful surrounds of Italy, directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by period-film master James Ivory that features cinema’s most memorable peach scene.
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK — Rent or buy from Apple TV +
Barry Jenkins’s follow up to his Oscar-winning debut Moonlight is a tender, hard-hitting drama about the relationship between a devoted 1970s black American couple in Harlem whose ordinary love story is threatened by the realities of racial injustice. Adapted from the novel by James Baldwin, it’s a moving portrait of an everyday love between everyday people that’s thrown into jeopardy by the dark shadow of the prejudices of their time and place.
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