“Romantic longing has provided the cinema with some of its most glorious and idealistic movies: Casablanca and Brief Encounter are films with an unabashed, unironic passionate flame at their centre,” said film critic Peter Bradshaw.
Movies such as Gone with the Wind and Doctor Zhivago lent something grand and epic to romantic love, but it was perhaps the much-loved weepie An Affair to Remember that did the most to introduce us to the more domestic idea of the chick flick or the date movie – the romantic film adored by women and tolerated by their husbands and boyfriends.
The romantic comedy was a further refinement, almost invented in its modern sense by Woody Allen and revived by Rob Reiner with his smash-hit, When Harry Met Sally, a success that has spawned a thousand sucrose imitations. Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is probably the most potent, old-fashioned romance of recent times. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung have that seductively heart-breaking self-sacrifice shown by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. Love will never go out of fashion.
These are the 25 best romantic films of all time according to the critics of the Guardian and Observer.
Director: David Lean
Stars: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard
, Stanley Holloway
Director: Michael Curtiz
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman
, Paul Henreid
Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
, Andrea Eckert
Original title: À Bout de Souffle
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg
, Daniel Boulanger
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Stars: Tony Chiu Wai Leung, Maggie Cheung
, Ping Lam Siu
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine
, Fred MacMurray
Director: Woody Allen
Stars: Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest
, Michael Caine
Director: Michel Gondry
Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet
, Tom Wilkinson
Director: James Ivory
Stars: Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter
, Denholm Elliott
Director: François Truffaut
Stars: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner
, Henri Serre
Director: Douglas Sirk
Stars: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson
, Agnes Moorehead
Director: Victor Fleming
Stars: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh
, Thomas Mitchell
Director: Leo McCarey
Stars: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr
, Richard Denning
Director: Sofia Coppola
Stars: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson
, Giovanni Ribisi
Director: William Wyler
Stars: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn
, Eddie Albert
Director: Éric Rohmer
Stars: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Françoise Fabian
, Marie-Christine Barrault
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Stars: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders
, Maria Mauban
Director: David Lean
Stars: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie
, Geraldine Chaplin
Director: Hal Ashby
Stars: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort
, Vivian Pickles
Director: Rob Reiner
Stars: Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan
, Carrie Fisher
Director: Cameron Crowe
Stars: John Cusack, Ione Skye
, John Mahoney
Director: Steve Kloves
Stars: Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer
, Beau Bridges
Original title: A Matter of Life and Death
Directors: Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell
Stars: David Niven, Kim Hunter
, Robert Coote
The Guardian (founded in 1821) is a British national daily newspaper, and the Observer (founded in 1791) is its Sunday sibling. They are amongst the most influential papers in the world. The Guardian and its journalists have won numerous journalism awards, especially in the last decades.
Source: The Guardian
Last checked on: 16 January 2016
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