Zeit bites: Movies for Valentine’s Day

Love. It’s a mug’s game. It’s easy to be cynical about love and romance, especially on Valentine’s Day with all its cheesy cards, stuffed toys, and heartshaped boxes of stale chocolates.

However, love is one of the all-time great themes of movies, so here’s my list of films to turn that wizened husk rattling around in your chest into the plump, fluttering pulse racer it was meant to be.

Remember when you genuinely imagined your cool chat could make people fall in love with you? Well, Before Sunrise (iTunes) is a nostalgia trip of a movie about that.

Richard Linklater’s romantic trilogy (which concludes with Before Sunset and Before Midnight) is about what it feels like to meet someone who shows you who you really are.

Yes, Lars and The Real Girl (iTunes) is technically a film about a bloke who falls in love with a sex doll, but it’s also a tender exploration of the self worth that we can find in communing with another human being. See also: True Romance (iTunes), in which true love turns a comic book geek into a kickass gangster.

British tear-jerker Truly Madly Deeply (iTunes) finds the funny side of being haunted by ‘‘the one’’ you lost, exploding that myth in the most bittersweet way imaginable.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we haven’t all always been encouraged to love who we want to love.

Exploring the loneliness and isolation of being a gay man in 1960s America, A Single Man (iTunes) gives us Colin Firth as an uptight English professor who can’t fill the void left by the death of his lover, no matter how many beautiful things he’s surrounded by.

When you’re done with those, there are 10 episodes of You – a scathing indictment of the fables we tell ourselves about love and romance – waiting for you on Netflix, just in case you’ve been too carried away.