NOT THE SAME OL' LOVE STORIES
Movies that will make you laugh and cry ... and break your heart a little
Love comes in as many permutations as there are quirks and quandaries of human nature.
And cinema has captured just about every one of them. From the conventional to the taboo, from Nick and Nora to Nora Ephron, from Jules et Jim to James L. Brooks, Hollywood has found ways to capture the thrill, heartbreak, absurdity and lifelong comfort of companionship.
Search for “love in the movies,” and the results generally highlight the same names: Ephron, of course — for such classics as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle — along with Nancy Meyers (It's Complicated, Something's Gotta Give), Brooks (Broadcast News) and Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually).
Those movies are definitive for their mostly cheerful, occasionally bittersweet depictions of love at its most idealized. But there are countless kinds of love and equally countless ways to capture it on screen. We've picked some timeless examples.
MAD LOVE WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)
Most of us know dysfunctional couples whose arguments regularly cross that cringe-inducing line between public performance art and intimate foreplay. But Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor took the archetype to its most brazen, bravura extremes in Mike Nichols's riveting adaptation of Edward Albee's play about displaced grief, bourgeois hypocrisy and shared madness. Loud, loquacious and increasingly bizarre, this chamber piece of horrors just gets weirder and better with age.
Golden Age pick: Vertigo
BAD LOVE THE GRADUATE (1967)
In Hollywood, “You did it again” can sometimes be a backhanded insult, but in Nichols's case it's high praise. This generational touchstone starred a then-unknown Dustin Hoffman as recent college student Ben Braddock, who embarks on a disastrous affair with one of his parents' friends, played by Anne Bancroft at her most seductively predatory. It's naughty, subversive and just plain wrong — but Nichols and his cast played it as virtuosically as that Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack.
Golden Age pick: Double Indemnity
SAD LOVE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)
Written by Charlie Kaufman, this meditation on love, loss and forgetting possesses all the earmarks of his work, including elastic, Escher-like notions of time and space. But what could be a heady exercise in eccentricity becomes something deeper and more profound, thanks to astonishing lead performances by Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder what the hell is going on. But mostly you'll cry.
Golden Age pick: Casablanca
STAR-CROSSED LOVE LOVE & BASKETBALL (2000)
Sure, we all have our favourite Romeo and Juliet adaptation.
But Gina Prince-Bythewood's timeless story captured another form of fated romance, one rooted not in elaborate rituals of patrimony or social hierarchies but in friendship and the competitive world of sports. “Meant to be” takes on a different and utterly resonant meaning in this portrait of the real-world complications that can slow a couple's roll toward destiny.
Golden Age pick: Brief Encounter
YOUNG LOVE A LITTLE ROMANCE (1979)
No one doesn't love Diane Lane. But few may remember her screen debut in this beguiling coming-of-age tale, in which she plays the daughter of American expats living in Paris. When she meets a French boy her age, the two embark on an endearing romantic adventure, helped along by a mentor portrayed by Laurence Olivier. Sweet without being insufferable, sentimental without being smarmy, this is a gem of a film that captures every facet of first love with subtlety and not an ounce of condescension.
Golden Age pick: Splendor in the Grass
FORBIDDEN LOVE HER (2013)
Joaquin Phoenix delivers one of his finest performances as a lonely writer of e-greeting cards who falls in love with his computer's operating system, voiced to silky cool-girl perfection by Scarlett Johansson. Writer-director Spike Jonze spins this weirdly poignant story with just the right balance of surrealism and groundedness, giving Phoenix's emotional journey heft as he doles out crucial bits (and bytes) of information. What sounds ridiculous and kind of creepy on paper turns out to be haunting and surprisingly moving.
Golden Age pick: Harold and Maude
MESSY LOVE MISSISSIPPI MASALA (1991)
Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury sizzle in this densely layered story, in which a Ugandan woman of Indian descent falls in love with an American man of African descent. The beauty of Mira Nair's film is that the complications aren't solely about ethnic differences; her lens widens to take in all manner of tensions and contradictions having to do with identity, culture, national histories and personal memory. The best kind of messy.
Golden Age pick: The Way We Were
TOXIC LOVE TWO FOR THE ROAD (1967)
Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney play a bickering couple who reflect on their courtship, marriage and ensuing tensions as they play out in successive car trips through France. Amid the acrid banter and moments of breathtaking cruelty, director Stanley Donen treats the audience to a visual fantasia of cars, magnificent vistas, lilting Henry Mancini music and a Givenchy wardrobe Hepburn wears with flawless aplomb.
Golden Age pick: Days of Wine and Roses
LOST LOVE MOONLIGHT (2016)
Barry Jenkins's achingly poetic coming-of-age story, about a young man's sexual self-discovery amid poverty and crime in modern-day Miami, bursts with colour, life, violence and grievous neglect. Featuring career-making performances from Mahershala Ali, Trevante Rhodes and André Holland, the film is structured as a triptych, culminating in a magnificent third act wherein the protagonist comes to terms with the first love that might have got away but defined him nonetheless.
Golden Age pick: An Affair to Remember