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Nov 28, 2023 · Rom-coms have their place, but if you're looking for a yearning, steamy, swoony love story, new or old, consult this list of the top romantic movies.
- Marisa Lascala
- Senior Parenting & Relationships Editor
- marisa.lascala@hearst.com
A woman, along with her lover, plans to con a rich man by marrying him, earning his trust, and then running away with all his money. Everything goes as planned until she falls in love with him.
- Dirty Dancing (1987) Set in 1963 but oh-so-’80s in its idea of hairstyles and heartthrobs, this sexy summer-camp romance defied its critics to become a classic.
- Trouble in Paradise (1932) In this gold-standard screwball caper comedy, a gentleman thief, a lady pickpocket and a Parisian heiress form an elegant triangle, the preferred shape of Ernst Lubitsch — that sublime architect of romantic instability — who loved to test how seemingly solid couples might respond to a good romantic upset.
- Splash (1984) A man falls in love with a mermaid: What could be simpler, or sweeter, than that? Yet Tom Hanks, in the movie that made him a movie star, does not go lightly into his communion with a woman who’s half-fish.
- The Bridges of Madison County (1995) Amid a career of macho performances, Clint Eastwood tapped into his sensitive side to deliver one of his most indelible characters in Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photographer on assignment in Iowa, who stops by a farmhouse to ask for directions.
- 50 'Notorious'
- 49 'Trouble in Paradise'
- 48 'Silver Linings Playbook'
- 47 'Wings'
- 46 'The Lady Eve'
- 45 'Closer'
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
The words “romance” and “Alfred Hitchcock” don’t tend to go together in the minds of most, given the director was best known for making thrillers, dark comedies, and crime movies. But Alfred Hitchcock's great films were often accessible and broadly appealing, and part of this sometimes meant including romance elements. With something like Notorious, those romance elements actually appear in a surprisingly prominent way, with the thriller/mystery stuff almost taking a backseat to the romance a...
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Ranking among the greatest movies of the 1930s, Trouble in Paradisemay well be more than 90 years old, but much of it feels pretty well timeless. It blends a crime-related storyline with romance and comedy in a way that still feels rather fresh and engaging, following a man and woman who are romantically involved and make their money through pickpocketing. Complications ensue when a love triangle ends up developing, since the man begins to fall in love with a wealthy woman the pair have set t...
Directed by David O. Russell
Silver Linings Playbookmight be fairly recent in the overall scheme of things, but it still feels good enough to label as something of a modern classic that future decades will hopefully be kind to (admittedly, it can be hard to know for sure how a film will age and be viewed in the years to come). It centers on a troubled man being released from a psychiatric hospital and moving back in with his parents, all the while trying to reconnect with his ex-wife, yet finds a connection between him a...
Directed by William A. Wellman
Serving as a bit of a genre-buster, Wings is a romance film, a melodrama, a World War I movie, and also something of an action movie, given how many dogfighting sequences are featured. It centers on two fighter pilots who are both in love with the same woman, and how this eventually threatens their friendship, all the while they also have to deal with the dangers of serving in World War I. It’s understandably old-fashioned, but that’s a word that can be thrown at most movies that are almost a...
Directed by Preston Sturges
Preston Sturges may not have directed many movies, but the ones he did make were generally winners, to the point where it’s possible to say he was a quality-over-quantity type of filmmaker. The Lady Eve is rightly considered one of his best and most enjoyable efforts (even by the oftentimes dour Paul Schrader), following a female con artist who targets a wealthy man, falls for him, has her con exposed, gets dumped by the man, and then tries to win him back by posing as a different person alto...
Directed by Mike Nichols
Those who are after a nice or pleasant movie probably won’t find it with Closer, which is a surprisingly dark and emotionally intense romance film. It takes an approach that might normally be played for comedy – a tangling of romantic partners when two couples clash and form a complex web of infidelity and lies – but looks at the ramifications of doing such a thing with grit and plenty of hard feelings. Closer is, therefore, something of a miserable movie, but it’s also captivating and admira...
- Jeremy Urquhart
- 18
- 2 min
4 days ago · Whether your date is hot or Häagen-Dazs, get ready to be couchlocked by love with these 100 best Fresh romance movies!
We asked over 100 filmmakers, writers and actors to vote for the most romantic movies of all time. Romance may be dead in the real world, but in cinema, it’ll live forever. Love is simply too ...
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Jun 8, 2024 · Looking for a good love story? Here are the 25 best romance movies of the 21st Century so far, from heartwrenching dramas to raunchy rom-coms.
