40. “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012)
For some reason — its awards success, perhaps? — “Silver Linings Playbook” never seemed to be really considered a romantic comedy by many. Which is absurd, because it completely is — just a really exceptional one. Based on Matthew Quick’s novel, it tracks the fledgling relationship between the bipolar Pat (Bradley Cooper) and depressed, grieving Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), as they train for a dance contest together. It hits all the expected beats, but writer/director David O. Russell gives it a life, a vibrancy, a messiness, a blue-collar energy that feels almost unprecedented in the genre, at least in its recent, Katherine Heigl-tainted history anyway.
39. “Beyond The Lights” (2014)
Romantic drama — melodrama, even — has been dominated in recent years by Nicholas Sparks and his very particular brand of Martha’s Vineyard home-porn and stupid plot twists. But then something like Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Beyond The Lights” comes along and reminds you of what can happen when the genre’s done well. Gugu Mbatha-Raw gives an amazing performance as a Rihanna-ish pop star in a deep depression whose life is saved by an ambitious police officer (Nate Parker), even as those around them try to keep them apart. It’s sensitively, beautifully drawn stuff, but excels even more as a portrait of racial and gender identity (few movies have used hair to tell story and reveal character in such a moving way).
38. “Solaris” (2002)
Steven Soderbergh isn’t known for being shy, but taking on a remake of Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic (based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem) was a bold move even for him. While it tanked hard at the box office, it paid off in our eyes, though: leaner and sparer than the original without losing its essence, it’s also arguably more moving by being a little less obscure. George Clooney gives one of his best, and most atypical, turns as a psychologist sent to a a space station orbiting the planet Solaris to investigate the lack of contact, only to be greeted by his wife Rheya (Natasha McElhone), who killed herself years earlier. The film’s far more than just a romantic story, but it excels in particular in its portrait of regret, grief and love, the rare sci-fi film that feeds your heart as well as your eyes.
37. “What Time Is It There?” (2001)
Critics of Tsai Ming-Liang would argue that he constantly makes the same film, meditations on loneliness, loss and longing told through utterly unhurried, gorgeously made images. His fans would possibly agree, but would argue that that was the whole point. Either way, “What Time Is It There?” might be his finest hour, following Tsai’s muse Lee Kang-sheng, who falls for a Paris-bound customer (Chen Shiang-chyi) and begins setting every clock he can find to Paris time. It’s an unforgettable film about the space between people, and about the way that missing someone can come to dominate your every waking thought.
36. “Her” (2013)
Starring a tremulous Joaquin Phoenix in one of the finest and most sympathetic performances of an already stellar career, Spike Jonze’s near-fi love story “Her” also features voice acting work from Scarlett Johansson that is so evocative we remember the Operating System she plays (Samantha) as being as real as she is to Phoenix’s Theodore. There’s a quiet intelligence to Jonze’s probing of our relationship with our machines — it’s a quietly scary film about the singularity in some respects — but mostly it’s a film marked out by its unusual grace in recognising how, in the face of our growing dependence on technology, we are somehow more fallibly human than ever.
35. “Brokeback Mountain” (2005)
Still perhaps the most successful LGBT-themed movie ever made, Ang Lee’s gorgeous, wrenching “Brokeback Mountain” connected in part because it told quite a universal story – regardless of your gender or sexuality, there was something to connect to in the story of sheep herders Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose affair over decades persists even though they feel they can never truly be together. But that shouldn’t erase its intrinsically queer nature, its picture of a love story that reminded theatergoers that same-sex love wasn’t restricted to witty Manhattanites. Lee (whose background in the theme goes back to his early film “The Wedding Banquet”) directs beautifully, and it’s hard to think of two better performers to pull it off than Ledger and Gyllenhaal.
34. “Blue Valentine” (2010)
Oddly generic in its setting in a way that could only be autobiographical, “Blue Valentine” might not have some clever hook or plot contrivance, but it nevertheless tells as wrenching a story of young love and its end as the 21st century has seen already. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams (the patron saint of difficult romantic movies between this and “Take This Waltz”) play a young blue-collar Pennsylvania couple whose courtship is moved up when she falls pregnant (potentially by an ex): five years on, their marriage is collapsing even while they clearly still love each other in some ways. Raw and exposing, gorgeously lensed (by Andrij Parekh) and scored (by Grizzly Bear), it cunningly uses chronology and the fearless, beyond intimate performances by the two leads to create a full portrait of a relationship in less than two hours.
33. “Middle Of Nowhere” (2012)
After the success of “Selma,” with “A Wrinkle in Time” on the way and documentary “13th” potentially heading for an Oscar, Ava DuVernay is swiftly becoming a household name, but somehow her breakthrough feature “Middle Of Nowhere” still goes dispiritingly underseen by many. It’s a quiet, understated drama about a young medical student (the astonishing Emayatzy Corinealdi) whose husband (Omari Hardwick) is serving an eight-year prison sentence. She’s dedicated to him, but also sparks up a friendship, which wouldn’t take much to become more, with a bus driver (David Oyelowo). Lyrical but unsentimental, interior but beautifully executed visually, it feels utterly confident in the time and space it takes to tell its story, and while its beginnings are modest, it’s already clear what a talent DuVernay would turn out to be.
32. “Lost In Translation” (2003)
Unlike almost everything else here, it’s not 100% clear if “Lost In Translation” is a romance in the sexual sense. Part of the brilliance of Sofia Coppola’s woozy, gorgeous Oscar nominee about the relationship between the bored young wife (Scarlett Johansson) of a photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) and an aging movie star (Bill Murray) as they wait around a Tokyo hotel is that it could be purely romantic, it could be something more platonic, but in a way it doesn’t really matter — that two souls adrift have found and helped each other. The film has its issues — a sometimes queasy approach to the Japanese characters, for one — but the stunning direction, the performances, the command of sound and vision go a long way to making up for them.
31. “My Summer Of Love” (2003)
Most of these stories, even the sad ones, posit romantic love as a positive thing: better to have loved and lost etc etc. “My Summer Of Love” is a rarity in that it tells a love story in which love is a purely destructive force. Adapted by future “Ida” Oscar-winner Pawel Pawlikowski from Helen Cross’s novel, it sees working-class Yorkshire girl Mona (Nathalie Press) befriend and eventually fall for posh boarding school Tamsin (Emily Blunt, in her breakthrough role), across a long, tempestuous summer that will reveal Tamsin to be more — or perhaps less — than she’s led her new friend to believe. It’s a rare film that so well captures both a hazy, endless summer like this, and the intensity of those female friendships that can tip obsessively into something more, but Pawlikowski does both here: it’s a great, undersung film that deserves to be talked about more post the helmer’s success with “Ida.”