For a Friday with friends, you need a film that doesn't require perfect silence to work. Something engaging enough that it holds attention even in a room with people in it.
In retrospect, the 2010s were a decade of quiet excellence - films doing serious work without demanding credit for it.
Great romance films understand that love is most interesting before it's resolved. The tension, the almost, the not-yet â that's where the cinema is.
After two years away, Hache returns to Barcelona seeking a fresh start. Falling for Gin while facing unresolved feelings for Babi, he must confront love, loss, and who he's becoming.
Hollywood, 1927: As silent movie star George Valentin wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion, he sparks with Peppy Miller, a young dancer set for a big break.
Based on the true story of Robin, a handsome, brilliant and adventurous man whose life takes a dramatic turn when polio leaves him paralyzed.
A man and a woman meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatally mismatched and yet drawn to each other.
A romantic comedy centered on Dexter and Emma, who first meet during their graduation in 1988 and proceed to keep in touch regularly. The film follows what they do on July 15 annually, usually doing something together.
These films work because they trust their characters to be complicated. Love doesn't simplify people â it complicates them. These films know that.
Free-spirited writer Juliet Ashton forms a life-changing bond with the delightful and eccentric Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, when she decides to write about the book club they formed during the occupation of Guernsey in WWII.
A controlling father's attempts to ensure that his two children succeed in high school backfire after his son experiences a career-ending sports injury. Their familial bonds are eventually placed under severe strain by an unexpected tragedy.
Spain, 2003. An accidental discovery leads Clarence to travel from the snowy mountains of Huesca to Equatorial Guinea, to visit the land where her father Jacobo and her uncle Kilian spent most of their youth, the island of Fernando Poo.
An acclaimed writer, his ex-wife, and their teenaged children come to terms with the complexities of love in all its forms over the course of one tumultuous year.
A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system (Mumbai's Dabbawallahs) connects a young housewife to a stranger in the dusk of his life. They build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox. Gradually, this fantasy threatens to overwhelm their reality.
The films that give you a good cry do so because they've earned it. Not through sadness alone - through care. These films care.
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.