Lost in Translation
Coppola’s wry, magical opus. Maybe falling in love has never been like this, but you’ll believe that it should be.
Romance
Films which feature romantic themes
Swiss Army Man
Not a movie for the faint of anything. If you can get through the gross stuff, you might discover a romance.
The Man Who Laughs
Veidt becomes the face of Expressionism: this is dramatic self-harm on a scale that defines greatness.
His Girl Friday
The Grant/Russell pair could have made a hundred movies if this one didn’t count as all of them.
Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna)
You meet Woman in the Dunes rather than watch it, and when you do, the result is a series of sensations that begin to represent yourself to you.
The Bishop’s Wife
There isn’t a moment of romantic energy behind the interaction of Niven and Young in The Bishop’s Wife, and not one time that Cary Grant makes us happy to be on his side. Capra used to invite us to wonderful sleepy towns. Henry Koster takes us to one we’d rather sleep off.
That Touch of Mink
Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much was Day’s proof of concept, which based on her further career everyone seemed to ignore. That Touch of Mink, a film that makes Cary Grant look like he’s not an actor, is just the kind of spineless jaunt that I hate to associate her with.
Her
The first thing that must be clear about Her is that it is not satirical: its future is a believable take on a theme of hipster consumerism. Its people are realistically quirky. They are surrounded by fakery but they are not fake. They are peculiar and humane, rediscovering their spirits in a backwards world. Jonze excels at telling a story of us exaggerated into its essentials.
La Belle et La Bête (2014)
Christophe Gans admirably refers to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 La Belle et La Bête while presenting a version of the fairytale that should read as authentic even to those who have only seen the Disney one. What he does not do is capture the original’s symbolic poetry or frame the old pieces in such a way that their retelling is a revelation.
Punch-Drunk Love
Anderson saw Sandler’s rage and made a movie to justify it. The magic that results never gets old.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
A rom-com in which two conflicted lovers try to forget each other by hammering on actual drugs wouldn’t be more surprised with itself than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is with its own matter-of-fact science fiction substitute. Kaufman has made the 2001: A Space Odyssey of love affairs.