The best films for a group don't flatten the experience - they create one. You want something that generates opinions, debates, a reason to stay up later than planned.
The 2000s produced a remarkable run of intelligent, ambitious cinema - a decade that took genre seriously and rewarded patient audiences.
Romance cinema at its finest doesn't sentimentalise love. It shows it clearly â messy, inconvenient, and still somehow worth everything.
In 1920s Bagheria, Giuseppe 'Peppino' Torrenuova works as a shepherd to financially help his poor family. Over the next fifty years, Giuseppe's life, as well as the life of the village, is observed. Giuseppe grows up, joins the Communist Party, marries a local girl, has children, and forges a political career for himself.
Ten-year-old Gabe Burton is just an average kid growing up in Manhattan until Rosemary Telesco walks into his karate class. But before Gabe can tell Rosemary how he feels, she reveals that she won't be going to public school any more. Gabe has a lot more to learn about life, love, and girls.
Extremely shy Lars finds it impossible to make friends or socialize. His brother and sister-in-law worry about him, so when he announces that he has a girlfriend he met on the Internet, they are overjoyed. But Lars' new lady is a life-size plastic woman. On the advice of a doctor, his family and the rest of the community go along with his delusion.
When Isabelle and Theo invite Matthew to stay with them, what begins as a casual friendship ripens into a sensual voyage of discovery and desire in which nothing is off limits and everything is possible.
A young widow discovers that her late husband has left her 10 messages intended to help ease her pain and start a new life.
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.
As the only legitimate heir of England's King William, teenage Victoria gets caught up in the political machinations of her own family. Victoria's mother wants her to sign a regency order, while her Belgian uncle schemes to arrange a marriage between the future monarch and Prince Albert, the man who will become the love of her life.
Harry Caine, a blind writer, reaches this moment in time when he has to heal his wounds from 14 years back. He was then still known by his real name, Mateo Blanco, and directing his last movie.
When she learns she's in danger of losing her visa status and being deported, overbearing book editor Margaret Tate forces her put-upon assistant, Andrew Paxton, to marry her.
After his long-time girlfriend dumps him, a thirty-year-old record store owner seeks to understand why he is unlucky in love while recounting his "top five breakups of all time".
A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents.
Great films that make you cry do so because they've made you care. By the time the emotion lands, you're not surprised - you're just not ready for it.
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.