Moonrise Kingdom: American Comic
Wes Anderson turns our lives into a perfect documentary of feeling. It’s not real, but it’s important.
Romance
Films which feature romantic themes
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.
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)
A captivity film about entire cultures. And the best sand photography ever filmed.
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: We are the Techno-Lonely
A romance that centers on being lonely. A poem to anyone lost in our love for each other.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Adorable in a way movies aren’t anymore. The McDormand/Adams duo shines.
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
How else would the smartest screenwriter of the century make a story about losing your mind, except by making it literal? A romance that counts as all of them.