A Cinephile’s Guide To Valentine’s Day

Kim Ki-Duk’s metaphysical romance follows Tae-Suk (Jae Hee), a professional squatter invisible to society but for an abused woman Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon) who watches him unobserved until that electric moment where they make eye contact. What follows is a long, mysterious courtship where rituals are subverted, catharsis is offered and long-delayed, and Tae-Suk perfects his ability to be as weightless and ephemeral as an idea of love. It goes nowhere you expect it to go in its own time. A singular achievement.

Where to stream 3-Iron

The obvious Wong Kar Wai is his heartbroken portrait of love in eternal abeyance In the Mood for Love, but while any number of his other films hits that romantic sweet spot (God, Days of Being Wild is good), make mine Happy Together in which Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai play tumultuous lovers in close, doomed orbit around one another. Christopher Doyle’s cinematography is swooning, mercurial, gorgeous and all the low lows of young love are balanced against highs so stratospheric it’s hard to ever hit them again.

Where to stream Happy Together

Lee Grant wasn’t just a scene-stealer of an actor – she was a wonderful director as well. Her masterpiece is Tell Me a Riddle: a story about an aging couple on their last trip together, reaffirming a lifetime’s commitment to one another along the way. I was reminded of this film often while watching Harry Macqueen’s beautiful Supernova (2020). Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova play the old folks and Brooke Adams, their daughter.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights makes me cry like a baby every time I see it. Its story of pop star Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) falling in love with young cop Kaz (Nate Parker) at the moment she realizes she’s being exploited for her sex appeal and not her talent is a story of empowerment, coming into the self, and finding out what’s really important before it’s too late. It flew under too many radars who saw it as a A Star is Born take, I think. It’s a lot more than that.

Where to stream Beyond The Lights

The Fabulous Baker Boys are brothers Jack and Frank (Jeff and Beau Bridges): a cheesy lounge act looking for a spark when in comes Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer), a reminder for Jack that he used to have dreams that didn’t include playing Vegas watering holes and other elderly appointments. The performances are electric, the chemistry between Jeff and Pfeiffer (who is also incredible in romantic ’90s films Batman Returns and The Russia House) is palpable, and Steve Kloves’ directorial debut is one for the ages.

Where to stream The Fabulous Baker Boys

The Handmaiden is Park Chan-wook’s take on Victorian sado-masochism. I struggled between including this or his remarkable vampire film Thirst that has within it one of the most romantic images of the last fifteen years, but this one is so deliciously perverse, so indescribably slippery, so explicit and sexy, that it feels like a dance of the seven veils: alternately revealing and hidden, and unafraid to walk the dark corridors of love and desire. Park is one of the best filmmakers in the world. Six years since his last film is too, too long.

Where to stream The Handmaiden

The first of two Jane Campion films on this list is her adaptation of Susannah Moore’s pitch-black feminist noir In the Cut. Meg Ryan is Frannie, a life-addled English tutor who falls in love with smoldering detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) during the time of poetry in the New York City subways and a serial killer on the hunt for women just like Frannie. Sexually-explicit, at times hyper-violent, and emotionally raw, it’s far and away Ryan’s finest moment as a “serious” actor and cemented Campion then, as each subsequent film does, as my favorite living director.

Where to stream In The Cut

Powell/Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! sees young, driven Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) on her way to her meticulously planned wedding when a storm strands her on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides. There she meets the colorful locals including Torquil (Roger Livesey) and his friend, the force of nature Catriona Potts (Pamela Brown). Joan is forced to reconsider the intensity that’s driven her first quarter century; to take a breath and have a look around at the wild world. The obvious Archers flick is Stairway to Heaven or The Red Shoes, maybe the miraculous Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but in its economy – and in one of the greatest opening credits sequences of all time, give this one a run.

Where to stream I Know Where I'm Going

Y Tu Mama Tambien is Alfonso Cuaron’s teen idyll as two pals Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) fall in on a roadtrip from Mexico City to Oaxaca with older woman Luisa (Maribel Verdu)  through their proverbial Summer of ‘42, that is, their period of sexual awakening. A film about freedom set against sociopolitical strife in the same way as Phil Kaufman’s (tremendous) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it’s more than a gorgeous diary of sexual freedom, it’s a lovely travelogue and an exercise, pure, in sensual nostalgia.

Where to stream Y Tu Mama Tambien

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is another kind of nostalgia – a film shot-through with the pain of growing up “different” and the ecstasy of finding who you are in the arms of the right person at exactly the right time. Jenkins makes movies about sublime moments and he’s very good at it. Every second of If Beale Street Could Talk is tactile and in love with its poetry. But Moonlight is so delicate it’s almost a fable, which is after all the best kind of love story.

If you love, and who doesn’t love, Moonstruck, give Joe Vs. the Volcano a shot. Written and directed by Moonstruck’s author, John Patrick Shanley, it’s less of an odd pick now than it would’ve been at the turn of this century, credit to the cult that’s appropriately-grown around it. It’s perfect pandemic viewing as well as Tom Hanks’ ordinary Joe develops a “brain cloud” and decides that in order to give his life meaning, he will throw himself into a volcano. Meg Ryan is fantastic in three roles.

Where to stream Joe Versus The Volcano

Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey is almost a sequel to her remarkable debut Hester Street in its portrait of New York’s Jewish culture as seen through its matrilineal lines. Bookstore employee Isabelle (Amy Irving) juggles the attentions of rakish author Anton (Jeroen Krabbe) and unassuming pickle vendor Sam (Peter Riegert) in a very specifically gynocentric way. Micklin’s eye for this community is affectionate while remaining critical of the places where it’s mired in the past. There are no clowns in this picture. It’s adults in adult situations making decisions for the rest of their lives.

Where to stream Crossing Delancey

Madman Leos Carax’s second film, Mauvais Sang, finds his muse Denis Lavant as thief Alex hired to help two thugs steal the miracle cure for a future-STD killing everyone having sex without love. That’s right. Alex falls in love with Anna (Juliette Binoche) and his moment of elation when he’s won her attention is scored to the single best use of David Bowie in a film of all time.

Where to stream Mauvais Sang

Donna Deitch’s stirring, affirming, melancholy and erotic Desert Hearts finds English professor Vivian (Helen Shaver) grieving a divorce taken aback by the attentions of forward Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) at the Reno ranch where she’s come to establish a quick residency. The barren landscapes counterpoint to Vivian’s gradual reawakening to the world as a sexual being worthy of being valued and desired. Tremendous.

Where to stream Desert Hearts

Ali, Fear Eats the Soul is arguably Fassbinder’s most-accessible film: the story of Moroccan gastarbeiter Ali (El Hedi ben Salme, Fassbinder’s lover in real life) falling in love with the much older Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and moving in with her to the dismay of her friends and real jerk of a son (Fassbinder himself). It’s hopelessly romantic. And it’s about something, too, a lot of somethings including racial tensions, immigrant fear and hate, and religious intolerance and ageism. Heady, but handled with the brevity and precision of a Brecht.

Where to stream Ali: Fear Eats The Soul

David Cronenberg’s The Fly is most-often read as a metaphor for AIDS at the beginning of the epidemic’s unfettered course through an intolerant United States, but I see it as a story of two people who love each other very much who, like we all will unless we’re very lucky, are forced to watch one of them physically just fall to pieces. Legendarily gory with Oscar-winning effects work by Chris Walas, it’s body horror as a thing we’re all experiencing now into middle age – and it taught me about what Kierkegaard meant when he talked so much about the labor of love.

Where to stream The Fly

French master Claire Denis’ deeply disquieting (and also pretty disgusting, but gorgeously so) Trouble Every Day is about how being in a long term relationship means, much like Cronenberg’s The Fly, suffering the labors of the day-to-day while appreciating the little, transcendent moments that make it all worth it. Alex Descas and Beatrice Dalle are a psychiatrist and his Jane Eyre-ian wife, kept under lock and key for her vampiric/cannibalistic tendencies, all centered around sex. He’s not a good jailor as she keeps getting loose, though he proves a slightly better undertaker in disposing of her victims. It’s how it is. Vincent Gallo and Tricia Vessey discover the good doctor’s grim responsibilities and, well, any more would be telling. A masterpiece of gore and doom by a real maverick of the medium, all the more so for discovering at the core of this Stygian tale, a lovestoned tribute to honoring your vows.

Where to stream Trouble Every Day

While it feels funny to put one of the best and most influential films of all time third on a list, so here’s F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans that has a man with a wandering eye realize before it’s too late that his true heart’s desire is the wife who loves him. Filmed in a way so complex and masterful that it feels as simple as a warm embrace, Murnau’s body of work disproves the lie that silent film was in any way inferior — and in many ways superior — to the first decades of the talkie. A film studies classroom in one package, it’s also an emotionally-wise exercise in empathy and the power of the montage.

Where to stream Sunrise

Charlie Kaufman’s and Michel Gondry’s twisting, turning, genius-level romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has sad Joel (Jim Carrey) trying to pay a company to erase his memories of his lover Clementine (Kate Winslett) after discovering that she has already done him the same disservice. Once the process is engaged, and as his memories of her blink out one after the other, Joel understands, too late, how his memories of love, even if they’re painful to him now, are precious and irreplaceable. Their decision at the end, and I won’t give it away, is one of the great romantic moments of all time.

Where to stream Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Finally, Jane Campion’s telling of the last days of John Keats’ (Ben Whishaw) and his immortal beloved Fanny Brawne’s (Abbie Cornish) doomed love affair, Bright Star is my favorite romantic film of all time. I introduced this film to a packed audience once by reading one of Keats’ letters to Fanny, and spent most of it weeping like a hamster. No one understands the rapture of the written word like Campion and she evokes the young couple’s intoxication with one another with fields of violets and diaphanous curtains blowing on warm spring winds. It’s one of the few films that makes me cry from beginning to end and it reminds me, at the end of it all, of how I feel about my wife all the time even when the mendacity of just surviving threatens to drown that all out. It’s shockingly-underseen. No time like the now to see it for the first time, or the hundredth.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Bright Star