10. “Amour” (2012)
The unspoken rule of arthouse cinema is that the more optimistic a title sounds, the more bruising the movie will be. Any movie called “Hope,” for instance, will invariably be about sex trafficking. This goes particularly for Michael Haneke (brace yourself: his new film is called “Happy End”), and yet as tough a watch as “Amour” can be, its title is entirely fitting in many respects. It follows the final months and weeks in the life of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), a piano teacher who lives in her Paris apartment with her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), but is soon left a shadow of her former self after a series of strokes. Her downward slide, and Georges’ devotion and frustrations over that time, is almost unwatchable even if you’ve never witnessed a loved one go through something similar, but it’s unutterably moving and oddly uplifting at the same time, particularly when it culminates in a final act of love.
9. “Blue Is The Warmest Colour” (2013)
Dogged by silly scandal-mongering in the months following its unprecedented triple-Palme d’Or win (for director Abdellatif Kechiche and stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux), thankfully the controversies have abated and the film’s real legacy have come to the fore in the years since the release of “Blue Is The Warmest Color.” Based on the graphic novel by Julie Maroh, it’s a simply transcendent, shining story of the ecstasies, agonies and even ennuis of a formative long-term relationship, between naive schoolgirl Adele (Exarchopoulos) and the blue-haired Emma (Seydoux), ’Blue’ is as pure an example of the cinema of empathy as the 21st century has given us.
8. “Upstream Color” (2013)
Shane Carruth followed up his spectacularly brainy “Primer” with the spectacularly brainy “Upstream Color,” a film which broadens Carruth’s talents to warp the heart as well as the mind. A very, very, very offbeat love story, it follows a man (played by Carruth himself) and a woman (Amy Seimetz) who fall for each other helplessly but discover their mutual attraction is at least partly to do with a symbiotic link to a herd of pigs, the biology of a mutant strain of orchid, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and a bizarre hypnosis/heist scheme. Full of wonder and scientific curiosity at the uncanny nature of love, and investigating it so minutely that its mathematics themselves become beautiful, we may not be able to answer definitively what it all means, but the film’s pervasive mood and lingering sustain (down to the polyglot Carruth’s gauzy cinematography and self-composed ambient score) means it’s a pleasure to continue puzzling it out, even all this time later.
7. “Punch Drunk Love” (2002)
Coming after the epic excess of “Magnolia,” and five years before the heightened period sweep of “There Will Be Blood,” “Punch Drunk Love” still feels like the oddity of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career — a small, intimate romantic comedy (of a sort…), starring Adam Sandler, no less. But it’s a measure of PTA’s greatness that film that could be (in some circles, still is) dismissed as ‘minor’ feels like a major work that stands with the director’s finest. Sandler plays Barry Egan, a troubled young man with rage issues, bullied by his sisters, who falls in love with Lena (Emily Watson), even while he’s being blackmailed by a phone-sex operator. Part of its brilliance is the way that Anderson builds on the kind of film that Sandler might usually make, but it’s a Happy Madison production as directed by Hal Ashby on heavy pain medication, a woozy, sweet treasure with its own very particular rhythms, that doesn’t care if you like it, but you like it anyway.
6. “Y Tu Mama Tambien” (2001)
Now the man behind “Children Of Men” and “Gravity,” Alfonso Cuaron reinvented his career with this unlikely love triangle, a deft little Spanish language picture that led to the acclaimed blockbusters that would follow. Something of a throwback to his debut “Sólo Con Tu Pareja,” it’s concerned with two sex-crazed young Mexican teenagers (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna) who end up on a spontaneous road trip with an older woman (Maribel Verdú). It could feel like a sort of juvenile wish-fulfillment comedy, but the film’s youthful, New Wave-ish energy combines with an incisive feel for male friendship and competitiveness and a laid-back assuredness that elevates it far above the familiar setup. And while not a romantic comedy in the traditional sense (its as focused on the bromance between the younger pair as anything else), it’s lent, largely through Verdu’s wonderful performance, a melancholy that proves truly affecting.
5. “Moonlight” (2016)
Barry Jenkins’ second film, a triptych about a young black gay man in Miami across two decades until his eventual reunion with an old sort-of-lover, is the rarest of films in that it grows in stature and power and beauty the more it lingers in your memory — and no matter how many other films you see in the weeks after, it can’t help but linger long. It’s a movie that flatters your senses to an almost synesthetic degree: a score that makes you remember the tidal spray of a beach at night, photography that recalls near-traumatic memories from childhood, framing that makes you feel like you’ve just been reunited with a crush you haven’t seen for two decades. It’s one with a brace of towering performances: the guilty paternal care of Mahershala Ali, the warmth and goodness of Janelle Monae, the deep confusion of Ashton Sanders, the sad, hazy self-destruction of Naomie Harris, the aching heart under wafer-thin armor of Trevante Rhodes, the single-handedly-bumping-you-a-point-on-Kinsey-scale of Andre Holland. And it’s a movie that looks at identity — racial identity, gay identity, manufactured identity, identity that comes through hard-worn self-knowledge — with almost novelistic depth.
4. “Before Sunset” (2004)
Picking a favorite of Richard Linklater’s decades-spanning trilogy of conversation-relationship-dramas is a tricky feat. You could go for the wide-eyed, youthful earnestness of 1995’s “Before Sunrise,” or the world-weary, bruised and battered state-of-our-marriage drama of 2013’s “Before Midnight,” but to us, “Before Sunset” splits the difference beautifully. It’s a Parisian reunion of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), who’d planned to meet again in Vienna but, as we’ll learn, never made it, and are only now back together after the publication of a novel he’s written about their one-night encounter back in the day. They wander the streets together, dancing round each other and immediately finding a connection, but finding that being a little older, and a little wiser, they might have missed their shot. Until the end, a final shot so utterly perfect that it somehow isn’t spoiled by a sequel picking up after it.
3. “Carol” (2015)
Adapting Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price Of Salt,” “Carol” sees Rooney Mara’s insular shopgirl Therese falling swiftly for the title character, played by Cate Blanchett, a wealthy woman undergoing a painful divorce from her husband. It’s the kind of Sirkian melodrama that Haynes pulled off beautifully with “Far From Heaven,” but “Carol” is entirely its own beast. It tackles the tropes and the style of the past, but feels fresh and contemporary, whether in the breathless freedom of Carol and Therese’s road-trip, or the wrenching hurt of their separation. If it might seem chilly and distant early on, it’s just biding its time, and builds to a cumulative power that leaves you reeling and, eventually, even uplifted. It’s a delicate, elegant, exquisite thing, and a rare film that comes alarmingly close to being perfect.
2. “In The Mood For Love” (2000)
Simply the most astoundingly gorgeous love story, draped in the slippery silks and satins of Christopher Doyle‘s most romantic photography, there are many films that are a feast for the eyes, but Wong Kar-Wai’s much beloved career highlight “In The Mood For Love” is a banquet. Its heavily eroticized mood and sensual imagery — all stolen moments in passageways and passionate clinches glimpsed through doors left ajar — overtakes the plot as the primary driver of the narrative; indeed, story-wise, it’s very slight. But the stunning mise-en-scène, from Maggie Cheung‘s high-necked costumes to the smoke that curls above Tony Leung‘s head beneath directional lamps in alleyways, lingers long after, like an intoxicating incense.
1. “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” (2004)
Picking the film that would take the number one slot here was a tricky job, and in the end, we had to follow our heart and go with the film that meant the most to us. And in this case, that was “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind,” a film of strange alchemy. Set in a world where a company enables you to delete your memories of broken relationships, and telling the story of Joel (Jim Carrey)’s relationship with Clementine (Kate Winslet) as technicians go backwards through it, it’s a film of strange alchemy. Where the dizzying intellect of Charlie Kaufman and the visual invention of Michel Gondry bring out the best in each other. Where the two very different stars each inspire something unexpected in the other. Where sci-fi, romantic comedy and bruising drama combine into something that feels quite unique. It’s a film that is incisive in the way that it captures the fractures and long-running annoyances in relationships, but also unexpectedly optimistic in the way that it shows that sometimes, it all proves to be worth it.
Obviously, we could have kept on going forever, but had to stop somewhere. There were a few films that we nearly included, and then decided weren’t quite close enough to being ‘romantic films’ that we could include — “Birth,” “Certified Copy” and “The New World” were among those ones, but they’re great anyway, and you should see them.
As a brief taste of the films on the longlist, we’d also suggest “Knocked Up,” “All The Real Girls,” “The Lunchbox,” “Once,” “Me & You & Everyone We Know,” “Gloria,” “Love Exposure,” “2 Days In Paris,” “Two Lovers,” “A Single Man,” “To The Wonder,” “Broken Circle Breakdown,” “Anomalisa,” “About A Boy,” “The Handmaiden,” “Enough Said,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “I Am Love” and “Climates.”
Plus there’s also “The Deep Blue Sea,” “Three Times,” “The Consequences Of Love,” “Your Name,” “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” “The Spectacular Now,” “Lust Caution,” “Millennium Mambo,” “Monsoon Wedding,” “Submarine,” “Let The Right One In,” “The Notebook” and “Moulin Rouge!” to name but a few. Anything else you think was deserving? Let us know in the comments.