Rain against the window and a film nobody else picked. This is one of the few configurations that actually allows you to pay full attention.
The best romantic films work because they're fundamentally about two people trying to understand each other. Love is just the context.
Bud Baxter is a minor clerk in a huge New York insurance company, until he discovers a quick way to climb the corporate ladder. He lends out his apartment to the executives as a place to take their mistresses. Although he often has to deal with the aftermath of their visits, one night he's left with a major problem to solve.
1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a new girl, Sook-hee, is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress, Hideko, who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering Uncle Kouzuki. But the maid has a secret. She is a pickpocket recruited by a swindler posing as a Japanese Count to help him seduce the Lady to steal her fortune.
A family dog - with a near-human soul and a philosopher's mind - evaluates his life through the lessons learned by his human owner, a race-car driver.
In 1999, a teen girl keeps close tabs on a boy in school on behalf of her deeply smitten best friend - then she gets swept up in a love story of her own.
A retired San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her.
What makes romantic cinema great is the gap between what characters want to say and what they actually say. These films live in that gap.
In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.
In 1927 Hollywood, a silent film star falls for a chorus girl just as he and his paranoid screen partner struggle to make the difficult transition to talking pictures.
A bullied teenage girl forms an unlikely friendship with a mysterious young man who protects her from her assailants, while she copes with the pressures of her final examinations.
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.
In the summer of 1983, a 17-year-old Elio spends his days in his family's villa in Italy. One day Oliver, a graduate student, arrives to assist Elio's father, a professor of Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.
The best suspense doesn't come from action - it comes from caring about what happens. These films make you care, then twist the knife.
Great romance cinema earns its place in memory by being honest about love â not flattering it, not sentimentalising it, but showing it clearly enough that it resonates.