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For Valentine’s Day, Letterboxd staff and contributors celebrate the cinematic couples who make us swoon, sigh and shout, “Love is real!”—from Jackie Brown and Max Cherry to Charles Grodin and Miss Piggy.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Letterboxd! To mark the occasion, we asked our correspondents to pen love letters to the movie couples that make them believe in the power of romance (to no one’s surprise, everyone wanted to write about Phantom Thread). Oh, and we asked a host of filmmakers and actors, too. Before you fume, “This is Before Trilogy erasure!” settle down a little—these folks have those bases covered. Watch above, and check out the full list of their selections here.
Want even more picks? Our team caught up with the community at Auckland’s Laneway Festival and got their selections, including Blue Velvet and Crazy, Stupid, Love.
One final caveat before we take you down the tunnel of love: these are our favorite romances, not favorite romance films. As such, you’ll see a potpourri of various genres, even some Cenobites and Muppets. This is because love stories transcend conventional structures and vessels. They defy the rigid rules of space, time and logic. They leave us flat on our backs, helpless, tender, open, with no one but them to help. At least, the most compelling ones do.
There’s nothing sexier than a game of wits. Women’s rights author Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger) is well aware of that. Womanizing journalist Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) is about to be. Throughout this campy ode to the Doris Day and Rock Hudson sex comedies of the ’60s, Pillow Talk in particular, these two whip-smart writers are always one step ahead of the other, using their brains to scheme their way into each other’s hearts.
But that’s not all: underneath Barbara’s candy-coated veneer lurks a cool splash of Gone Girl-style dominance (both films were shot by the same cinematographer!), while Catcher’s perma-bachelor bravado belies a tangy twist of Phantom Thread-style submission. Add a healthy smattering of innuendo-laden verbal and physical choreography, sprinkle in a mid-credits song-and-dance number that capitalizes on Zellweger and McGregor’s collective musical talent and ooooh baby, we’ve got ourselves a recipe for Most Rewatchable Rom-Com Ever Made. David Hyde Pierce in a Niles Crane-esque ing role is just the cherry on top.
I could write thousands of words on how much I adore every detail of this feel-good feminist fantasy—in fact, I did for its twentieth anniversary. Previously difficult to track down, Down with Love is thankfully now streaming on Criterion Channel as part of their New York Love Stories collection.
Nothing hits my heart harder than seeing a connection formed between two people who have resigned themselves to their stations in life. Those who find hope springing anew with a surprising bond shared with another. Such is the case for Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and Max Cherry (Robert Forster), the hustling flight attendant and charming bail bondsman who help pull each other out of their ruts in Quentin Tarantino’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown.
As is a Tarantino staple, Jackie Brown gave a second wind to the careers of Blaxploitation icon Grier and exploitation icon Forster. There’s something infectious about watching two masters of their craft getting to chew into such dimensional characters in leading roles for the first time in a while, and the picture comes most alive when their dynamic is in full play—whether that’s the all-too-relatable sequence of events in which Jackie plays Max a Delfonics record and we later see him purchasing the cassette tape and bopping his head along in his car, or the real-as-real-can-get conversation where they talk about Max’s hair plugs, and how Jackie’s rear end has grown with age, to which Max slyly responds, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”
“I wish I knew how to quit you,” except it’s me talking to the Hunger Games franchise. There are countless heart-shattering love stories, but the one I can’t shake—and haven’t been able to for over a decade—is when Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) quietly told Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), in the 75th Hunger Games, that, “If you die, and I live, I’d have nothing. Nobody else that I care about.”
At the climax of the second film, Catching Fire, their prickly and pressurized bond kind of explodes, and never wanes. What they share goes beyond strangers or enemies to lovers, the pair representing one single beacon of hope and resistance. People need to have something to believe in—in this case, it’s two people thrust together at the heart of a hellish dystopian dictatorship, in which human suffering (and attraction) is broadcast on television for entertainment. It is miraculous that such a sincere, undeniable love ever endured—to this day, I can’t think of many others like it.
Come to Tuscany for the sudden, sizzling kiss-in-a-barley-field sparks between George Emerson Jr. (Julian Sands) and Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter). Stick around for the delicious affair of subtext and secrets between Lucy’s older relative Charlotte Bartlett (Dame Maggie Smith, rest in peace) and worldly novelist Eleanor Lavish (Dame Judi Dench). Theirs is the real meet-cute on that first night in Florence. At the pensione’s dinner table, Charlotte moans about the boiled meat and her room with no view; Miss Lavish sizes her up through a monocle while rattling off Italian towns with precise pronunciation. (DJ, play ‘Montereggioni’ by Judi D.)
Recognizing “poor cousin Charlotte” as a woman who always gets what she wants by making it everyone else’s idea (and a spinster with a past: what did happen in Shropshire, where she “spent time” in the home of her “friend”, Miss Apesbury?), Eleanor leads Miss Bartlett down “little dark alleys” exclaiming that “one has always to be open, wide open” to “transfiguration”. It’s no accident their odd-couple adventures leave a chaperone-free Lucy wide open to George Junior. These Edwardian dames did it all for love.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Spaderheads of Letterboxd (by flag, I mean Nora’s essential list, “James Spader movies ranked by how much a fetish is taking over his life,” of which Secretary is ranked number two). As a devout Spaderhead, I’d say a few of his films would fit aptly for this prompt, but this onscreen romance is perhaps the most tender and rewarding of them all. Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who has long been stuck in a cyclical suffering, partakes in a sadomasochistic employer-employee relationship with Mr. Grey (James Spader), which ultimately heals and empowers her in ways she didn’t know possible. Secretary is for the freaks who want more vulnerability, deviancy and a broader illustration of sex and sexuality from their rom-coms.
Against a glorious seaside cliff, an artist remarks to his new muse that he feels he’s been looking for her for a very long time. “You found me,” she replies. In lesser hands, the sentiment might fall flat, but Daniel Day-Lewis’s Reynolds Woodcock and Vicky Krieps’ Alma feel a world unto their own, two self-assured, perfect freaks making it work through aching hunger and fussed routines and the rather plain, rather human desire to be needed. “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick” is no mere request—it’s a vow. Under their capable seduction, Phantom Thread has even become a verb in my daily vocabulary, as in: “I think I would be really good at Phantom Thread-ing someone.” Officially, I’m kidding. Unofficially, well…
Alain Resnais opens his 1959 directorial debut Hiroshima Mon Amour (written by Marguerite Duras) with the intertwined bodies of French actress Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Japanese architect Lui (Eiji Okada). Flesh meets flesh as ash rains down upon them, spliced between excerpted documentary footage of the 1945 bombing in Hiroshima, Japan. The couple’s one-night stand affair becomes a portrait of suffering, a trial of understanding and a blunt representation of and Japan and their stances in WWII. There’s no happily ever after, but these tortured characters make a profound impact on each other through intense trauma bonding in a walk-and-talk romance never to be forgotten.
Park Chan-wook understands that romance is about the unspoken intimacies: a box of takeout sushi. A knowing spritz of perfume on the back of one’s hand. A favorite song. A dozen half-typed and deleted text messages, composed in the middle of the night. A lit cigarette gently plucked from the other person’s mouth, ashed and placed back on their lips. Hands that reach into the other person’s coat pocket and know exactly which hidden pocket contains lip balm. A language lesson workbook, visibly studied, in the other’s native tongue. If love is a matter of noticing, what could be more romantic than this?
Mike Mills captures my kind of romance in Beginners. When Oliver (Ewan McGregor), dressed as Sigmund Freud, first meets Anna (Mélanie Laurent) at a costume party, Anna’s laryngitis forces her to keep silent. They spend the evening dancing, driving Oliver’s car on Silver Lake sidewalks, communicating back and forth via notepad. “Why are you at a party if you’re sad?” Anna writes. Oliver, bereaved from the death of his gay father Hal (Christopher Plummer) is suddenly perceived (even in his party disguise). Then on, Anna and Oliver say ‘more please’ to each other through petite, tender actions like articulating their lonesomeness, some sexless sleeping, and graffiti tagging. It’s the kind of romance rooted in sharing inner worlds: sorrow, uncertainty, delight and all.
In a note at the end of the book Maurice, author E.M. Forster wrote, “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise.” Written in 1914, the novel was not published until 1971, a year after Forster’s death and four years after homosexuality was decriminalized in the UK. In 1987, director James Ivory and co-screenwriter Kit Hesketh-Harvey adapted the work amidst a rise in anti-homosexuality laws under Margaret Thatcher. Together, they crafted a tender and impossibly romantic film of love lost, between the titular Maurice (James Wilby) and the terminally closeted Clive (Hugh Grant), and love found, between Maurice and the earthy Scudder (Rupert Graves).
As your heart swells and breaks and swells again along with Maurice, composer Richard Robbins’ swoony, ionate score transports you directly into Maurice’s sensitive soul. I think Nora sums it up best, calling the film “delicate and messy, heartbreaking and joyous, precise and ionate.” Forster wanted to give two men in love the “ever and ever that fiction allows.” With Ivory’s film, that love is also perfectly preserved in celluloid amber.
I know, I know—the more obvious pairing in the Muppet romance department is Miss Piggy and the object of her evergreen affection, Kermit the Frog. I’m eschewing that coupling due to Kermie’s consistent lack of consent, and also because Mr. the Frog and his friends regularly roast Piggy’s looks, personality, whole shebang. But in The Great Muppet Caper, Mademoiselle Thing finally gets a suitor worthy of her appetites in the form of playboy jewel thief Nicky Holiday (human man Charles Grodin and his unquenchable thirst).
Now, it ain’t easy bein’ sleazy, though Grodin makes it look so, committing to the down-bad bit with undue charm and visceral authenticity. See: the way he lip-synchs for his love life in the ‘Piggy’s Fantasy’ sequence, faux booming, “All the world’s ever wanted was youuu, a dream come truuue!” If it makes you wonder whether his ion for the porcine queen lingered off-screen, the answer is hell yes.
Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) have a routine. Every day, Evelyn arrives at Cynthia’s front door, where she’s given a series of chores to complete under the older woman’s disapproving gaze. The tasks escalate, from scrubbing the floor to hand-washing Cynthia’s underwear and rubbing her feet. It’s all part of an erotic game of dominance and submission, whose nuances are the subject of Peter Strickland’s ravishing The Duke of Burgundy. But what makes this film so special isn’t just that it’s sexy (although it is). It’s its mature and sympathetic view of the balance that’s necessary to really make a relationship work—both a kinky one like Cynthia and Evelyn’s, and the more vanilla kind.
My friends will say that my Joaquin bias is showing here, and they would not be wrong! The image of Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard), a young blind woman who’s a member of the isolated settlement in The Village, as she waits for Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix), her love interest, with her arm outstretched and hand trembling, has been stuck in my brain since my first time seeing it. It’s a picture of unshakable faith. Her love for him is so sure that she trusts he will find her amid the chaos when the strange creatures lurking in the woods have descended on their community. The film highlights the lengths you’d go to to protect those you love—and Ivy and Lucius’s relationship is so captivating and sweet that every part of you roots for them. NP
One of the most romantic images I’ve seen on-screen is a hand stretched out into the darkness, its owner reaching out despite an inability to see whether or not her lover will reach her in time. The moment, found in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, comes to mind often. Ivy Walker’s love for Lucius Hunt is so great that she is willing to present herself at her most vulnerable—emotionally, but even more notably, physically. As deadly creatures rush forward, Ivy stands firm, steady in her assurance that her love will find her amidst the darkness. In turn, her own dedication to protecting Lucius leads to even more acts of defiant faith. Shyamalan is no stranger to creating moments that highlight the power of faith and our relationships, but Lucius and Ivy might just be his magnum opus, blending the two into something particularly profound and stirring. CC
When icy yuppie Julia (Clare Higgins) takes a walk on the wild side with her husband’s lecherous brother Frank (Sean Chapman), their raw, revelatory sex rocks her dreary days so completely that she soon finds herself serving as Renfield for Frank in his return to the land of the living, even if that means throwing her own family into the kinky crossfire between Frank and the sadomasochistic Cenobites he conjured.
Julia and Frank’s unholy union in Hellraiser certainly doesn’t inspire the warm n’ fuzzies like most beloved cinematic romances; instead, it absolutely throbs with ultra-potent bloodlust, suggesting we’re all just one really hot weekend away from our own folie à deux with Uncle Frank. (Legend, and Letterboxd member Eat My Flick Boxers, has it that an older woman crew member proposed What a Woman Will Do for a Good Fuck as a potential title upon wrap—Jesus wept, indeed.) Julia and Frank’s nuclear-grade sexual chemistry is even alchemized into gorgeous, glistening viscera thanks to Bob Keen’s timeless practical makeup effects and the exquisite vision of fearless first-time director Barker, who has never been afraid to explore one of the ultimate taboos: lust after death.
Willard Huyck’s 1986 big screen adaptation of Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck character may be a lot of things: a fish out of water comedy, a noir throwback, a sci-fi adventure for kids, George Lucas’s biggest mistake. But it’s also an, ittedly unexpected, romance. It’s likely safe to say audiences that were drawn to the ments for Howard the Duck in the mid-’80s were not expecting to see anthropomorphic duck breasts, the tiniest condom in the universe tucked into Howard’s wallet and, perhaps most jarring, a sexual relationship between our wise-cracking extraterrestrial duck Howard and his human love interest, Beverly (Lea Thompson).
It’s not just that their interspecies relationship is awkwardly hot and heavy for a movie targeted largely at children, but it’s also an important part of the movie, whether you like it or not. What makes me appreciate the romance at the center of Howard the Duck is how unexpected it is and how much Huyck commits to it. Film critic and Letterboxd member Matt Singer even argues, “If you just imagine how many people in Hollywood had to sign off on a talking duck movie this horny, the whole thing gets a lot funnier.”
For the first half of North by Northwest, romance is the last thing on anyone’s mind. To the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s thundering score, we watch, breathless, as our dapper hero Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is abducted, drugged, framed for murder and nearly shot down by a crop-dusting airplane. It’s only when Thornhill boards a train to Chicago that he collides with ice-cool blonde Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), igniting one of Hollywood’s most electrifying romances. It’s delicious fun watching Grant and Saint sparring over cocktails in a sleek dining car, flirting and lying in the same breath, before giving in to their mutual attraction.
What’s thrilling about their romance, especially for modern audiences, is how equally matched the lovers are. Saint’s Eve is an independent woman with a sense of adventure, too busy pursuing spies to be a ive receptacle of male sexual obsession, while Grant’s blue-suited an is suave, attentive and (mostly) well-behaved. Happily, they end up saving each other, falling into bed while Hitchcock mischievously cuts to a train roaring into a tunnel. There’s nothing like murder, espionage and mistaken identity to fuel the fires of love.
Upon its release, Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of Great Expectations was loudly dismissed. Cuarón himself regards it as a “failed film”. And yet, the core relationship between Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Finn (Ethan Hawke) has lingered with me for decades. It’s a vicious, thankless bond, built of bad intentions. That their love for each other is real even still is a beautiful curse. The two leads boast the kind of yearning chemistry they write books about. Over the film’s fractured happy ending, Finn promises to forgive and forget all past sins: “It was as if it had never been… there was just my memory of it.” Like all love, easier said than done.
The first time I watched The Old Guard in 2020, I expected to be entertained, and I absolutely was. However, I didn’t anticipate witnessing one of the most beautiful love confessions ever delivered on-screen. When Joe and Nicky are captured and thrown into the back of a van, Joe responds to the soldiers mocking their relationship by saying, “This man is more to me than you can dream. He’s the moon when I’m lost in darkness and warmth when I shiver in cold. And his kiss still thrills me, even after a millennium…” His words in that scene are nearly as romantic as their first meeting, when they fought on opposite sides during the Crusades.
If this isn’t love, I don’t know what is. Although the relationship between Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee isn’t physically consummated, there isn’t a doubt in my mind that these two characters love each other because they literally went to the ends of Middle-earth together. In their relationship, J. R. R. Tolkien was trying to convey the love that blossoms between two men on a battlefield. It’s not sexual love, but it’s also more than platonic love. And it’s the beating heart of Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy.
