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.
Romance cinema at its finest doesn't sentimentalise love. It shows it clearly â messy, inconvenient, and still somehow worth everything.
When a impoverished widow's family moves to the big city, two of her five sons become romantic rivals with deadly results.
An Irish rogue uses his cunning and wit to work his way up the social classes of 18th century England, transforming himself from the humble Redmond Barry into the noble Barry Lyndon.
An urban office worker finds that paper airplanes are instrumental in meeting a girl in ways he never expected.
A fledgling ballerina falls in love with a brilliant composer, but the jealous head of the ballet company plots to drive them apart.
The summer of his high school freshman year, Hodaka runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if taking its cue from his life. After many days of solitude, he finally finds work as a freelance writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then, one day, Hodaka meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong-willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky.
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.
Everyone deserves a great love story, but for 17-year-old Simon Spier, it's a little more complicated. He hasn't told his family or friends that he's gay, and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate that he's fallen for online.
An unexpected meeting on a train leads two travelers to spend an evening wandering through Vienna. As the night unfolds, they share stories and conversations about life and love, exploring new ideas while a quiet intimacy grows between them, knowing it may be their only night together.
Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant.
A closeted boy runs the risk of being outed by his own heart after it pops out of his chest to chase down the boy of his dreams.
The story of a teenage boy called Yu, who falls for Yoko, a girl he runs into while working as an upskirt photographer in an offshoot of the porn industry. His attempts to woo her are complicated by a spot of cross-dressing - which convinces Yoko that she is lesbian - dalliances with kung-fu and crime, and a constant struggle with Catholic guilt.
The films that change cinema are rarely the ones trying to. They're usually just trying to be great - and accidentally redrawing the map.
The best romantic films leave you with an ache that has nothing to do with sadness. It's the ache of something real, depicted precisely.