Released 1970, 'Love Story' stars Ali MacGraw, Ryan O'Neal, Ray Milland, Katharine Balfour The PG movie has a runtime of about 1 hr 39 min, and received a score of 84 (out of 100) on Metacritic. We rarely get the chance to sit down and watch a full movie on YouTube for free. However, we've complied a list of some great movies you can do just that. YouTube link here. This one is more of a drama than a romantic movie, but still it embodies so beautifully the power of love. Watch the struggle of a woman who deals with losing her husband in a random act of violence. YouTube link here. The Proposal. One of my favorite Sandra Bullock movies.
It's common knowledge that YouTube offers a bounty of relatively short videos, such as instructional tutorials and movie trailers to name a couple. What many people aren't aware of is that the site also hosts full-length feature films.
While a lot of your favorite titles require a fee to watch, you might be pleasantly surprised at what's available for free. You aren't going to find many well-known titles in this list of freebies, or a lot of movies that you've even heard of before.
There are hidden gems, however, some featuring famous actors and directors. You'll notice that several are in black and white, mostly due to the fact that their copyrights have been lifted over time. Here are our favorites from that group.
YouTube isn't the only website that offers free movies. We keep an updated Best Free Movie Websites list that you should check out if the movie you want isn't free on YouTube.
House on Haunted Hill
The perfect mix of mystery and horror, House on Haunted Hill features Vincent Price at his finest as the oddly captivating millionaire Frederick Loren. In a plot that's been replayed dozens of times in both movies and TV shows since the film's release, Loren and his wife invite a handful of guests to spend a night in their so-called haunted house.
Best Love Movies On Youtube
Each person who lasts until morning is promised a significant cash prize, but as the clock reaches the wee hours they're faced with a litany of frightening encounters. Price's dulcet yet ghoulish tones provide a spine-tingling backdrop to a cinematic experience that still proves scary over fifty years later.
Love Story 1970 Watch Online
Plan 9 From Outer Space
One of the best/worst movies ever created, Plan 9 From Outer Space has long been a punch line in both Hollywood and the sci-fi community, yet for some reason, you just can't peel your eyes away from the screen. The narrator of this 1959 cult classic spins a wild yarn about aliens who plan to resurrect an army of undead warriors in an attempt to stop the human race from developing an all-powerful bomb.
Complete with paper plate-style flying saucers and some of the cheesiest acting to ever grace the silver screen, this unbelievable story about extraterrestrial grave robbers is sure to provide many unintentional laughs.
Better Off Dead
There aren't many actors that embody the 1980s better than John Cusack. Famous for films that embraced the decade of big hair and bigger dreams like Say Anything and Grosse Pointe Blank, his role in Better Off Dead may have flown under the radar a bit but in many ways was just as enjoyable.
Cusack's portrayal of the hapless Lane Meyer is great at times as he tries to win back his ex-girlfriend, who ditched him for a champion skier. In true 80s fashion, Meyer himself attempts to become a better skier than his foe as hilarity ensues throughout.
The Man With the Golden Arm
Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak steal the show in this gritty 50s drama that captures the battle between staying on the straight and narrow or falling back into the clutches of addiction. Ol' Blue Eyes is electric as Frankie Machine, a Chicago poker dealer and ex-junkie who tries to stay clean after coming home from a six-month prison stretch.
It's a tale of conflict plus romance and really hammers home how hard it can be to get a true second chance in life when the people around you seem intent on pulling you down. Nominated for three Oscars, The Man With the Golden Arm offers a little something for everyone.
Night of the Living Dead
Today it seems like every other movie has zombies in it, but at the time of its 1968 release, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead was groundbreaking. A random group of people chooses a dilapidated farmhouse to retreat from the growing swarm of the undead, and things get sticky as darkness falls and danger is imminent.
As the zombies approach, in-fighting among the group hiding out results in a tense, combustible situation. A bonafide classic in the horror genre, being able to watch this for free is a real treat even if it is in black and white.
Dawn of the Dead
Created a decade later as a follow-up to Night of the Living Dead, this zombified epic focuses on an undead outbreak that takes over Pittsburgh and eventually leads to a standoff in a nearby shopping mall. Sure, you could poke holes in some of the ridiculous plot twists and relatively amateurish action scenes... but why ruin a good thing?
If you're a fan of the genre and enjoyed Romero's first foray into a zombie apocalypse, Dawn of the Dead is a must-watch. Just be aware that this is the original 1978 version of the film, not the mid-2000s remake starring Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phifer.
Angels in the Outfield
You won't find Angels in the Outfield listed among the best all-time baseball movies, but this free Disney film is not without its simple charms. Notable actors including Danny Glover, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Lloyd, Tony Danza and even a brief appearance by a young Matthew McConaughey, along with a fun albeit predictable storyline make for a good, wholesome family film.
Jack and the Beanstalk
Based on the popular fairy tale which dates back to the 1700s, YouTube offers a terrific version featuring 70s-inspired Japanese animation with quality English voice acting. Out of all the adaptations available, this has to be my favorite.
Not only does it have a wonderful score, but this version of Jack and the Beanstalk adds its own twists to the well-known storyline. You may even find yourself watching along with your children!
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
One of many adaptations based on the Victor Hugo novel, this silent film features the estimable Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and stands the test of time almost a century later. Filmed in an era where horror makeup took a great deal of ingenuity, Chaney's appearance and mannerisms are so believable that you tend to forget you're watching a movie from the early 1920s.
Patsy Ruth Miller does a terrific job portraying Esmeralda, and at many points becomes the focal point as a result. If you've never seen a silent movie before and are understandably hesitant, this is a really enjoyable hour and forty minutes that just may change your mind about the genre altogether.
Sidekicks
Not a big hit at the time of its release, this movie has gained a bit of a cult following over the years. It features the late Jonathan Brandis as a bully victim who dreams of one day teaming up with Chuck Norris to fight back, a fantasy that eventually comes to fruition.
Beau Bridges plays the troubled teen's father in this Texas-based coming-of-age story that was directed by Norris' brother. If you like martial arts movies in the vein of The Karate Kid or if you're a Chuck Norris fanatic, Sidekicks is worth your time.
Fist of Fury
If you're into kung fu films, chances are you've seen Fist of Fury at least once. Also released under the name The Big Boss, it features Bruce Lee in one of his first leading roles doing what he does best — getting revenge.
While he initially takes an oath not to use his skills for violence, Lee is eventually forced to fight after his family members start mysteriously disappearing at the hands of an evil villain who happens to manage the factory where they all work.
Delhi Safari
An underrated 3D-animation film from India featuring a star-studded voice-over cast that includes Jason Alexander, Brad Garrett, Christopher Lloyd and Vanessa Williams among others, Delhi Safari tackles some important issues while remaining an enjoyable and visually-pleasing experience for kids.
The story involves a group of animals that travel from their forest all the way to the big city in an effort to coax the government into saving their home from aggressive builders.
Rating: PG (violence, rude humor, suggestive content, thematic elements)
Peter Rabbit's Christmas Tale
A holiday romp which follows Peter and his pals as they go on an hour-long adventure, all the while trying to avoid the evil fox. Your kids will love this video as it also features a couple of bonus episodes including The Tale of the Grumpy Owl and The Tale of the Big Move, which starts with Lily Bobtail escaping from a grumpy badger whom she has accidentally awoken.
Any list of the most romantic movies—this one narrowed to movies in the English language—is going to draw sighs and harrumphs over beloved films left off. Quite a few unforgettable love stories are in movies that don’t comfortably fit the category (Gone with the Wind, for instance), and the contemporary rom-com, while classifiably romantic, can seem as slight as the dandelion—a sunny flowering, a puffball dispersed on a breeze.
Movies that reach the romantic pantheon often have more at stake than a trip to the altar and don’t always end up happily. Some invoke the archetypes of myth and fairy tale, diving into the deeper imaginative realms of high Romanticism, a movement enamored of mystery and nature untamed. Others are modeled on the literary “romance,” a centuries-old genre of narrative fiction that combines adventure, idealism, and courtly love, as exemplified by King Arthur and his Round Table. These tales frequently take place on a journey where desire is set against duty, and where love alters destiny. The mortal dislocations of World War II—our “Good War”—are formidably represented in the realm of the romantic. Casablanca, for example, sees patriotism prevailing over the love of one person. The English Patient sees the reverse.
At the same time, high-flying ideals can become straitjackets or self-sabotage. Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious keys into a dark vein of lyricism, a place where self-sacrifice becomes voluptuous and ill. One thinks of William Blake’s iconic line, which sounds the bass note of Romantic poetry, “O Rose thou art sick.” That said, it is lyricism in all its textures—dark, light, aural, visual—that lifts these films to higher ground. Rodgers and Hart, in their song “Isn’t It Romantic?,” describe the feeling as “music in the night, a dream that can be heard … moving shadows write the oldest magic word.” Those moving shadows are movies.
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
1993
Beautiful and grave from the first strains of Gounod’s Faust to the last ray of sun bouncing off a window, Martin Scorsese’s film version of Edith Wharton’s greatest novel gets richer with every viewing. This period drama was a departure for Scorsese, until then known primarily for street, gang, and Mafia movies. But were the fabled 400 of New York’s Gilded Age any less controlling than the Cosa Nostra? Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, hasn’t sold his soul to the devil but to a gilded ideal. His marriage to the angelic debutante May Welland (Winona Ryder) will fulfill every conventional wish. But in May’s unconventional, unhappily married cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), he awakens to another ideal—the romance of deep affinity. This new love is blocked at every turn. But by whom or what? New York society closing ranks? Newland’s own pride of place? Or a moral code that wills out? It’s unbearably poignant, this life suspended between ideals.
THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY
1964
This movie works hard not to be on this list. It questions all the romantic clichés: self-sacrifice, heroism on the battlefield, loyalty in the bedroom. Directed by Arthur Hiller from a script by Paddy Chayefsky, The Americanization of Emily stars Julie Andrews, in her most crystalline period, and James Garner, everyone’s favorite good guy. Emily, having lost her father, brother, and husband to W.W. II, is sick of the cultural complicity that pushes men to be heroes. She believes a living coward is better than a wounded (or dead) warrior with a medal. Garner thinks similarly but opportunistically, without the moral dimension. Events twist and turn. Somehow he ends up as the “first man on Omaha Beach.” The movie is beguilingly intelligent, funny, and, in the last reel, romantic. Andrews and Garner have both said it’s their favorite of their films.
BEFORE SUNRISE / BEFORE SUNSET / BEFORE MIDNIGHT
1995, 2004, 2013
Eros on location. The first movie in this trilogy is about two students who meet on a train, get off in Vienna, and pass the hours before a flight walking, talking, and falling in love. As Celine, Julie Delpy, of the honey-colored hair and full mouth, could be a pre-Raphaelite nymph, and Ethan Hawke’s Jesse, with his glittering eyes and cool-dude goatee, is Mallarmé’s Faun (“Did I love a dream?”). The following two movies, at nine-year intervals, catch up with the pair in Paris and then in Greece. Action consists of dialogue interwoven with desire: Vienna is reminiscent of late-night dorm discussions about life; Paris is more psychologically revealing and tinged with confusion; in Greece resentments flare and shadows lengthen. Directed by Richard Linklater, the trilogy dispenses with the usual climb toward happy endings, a story tied up with a bow, and instead finds romance in immediacy—the blue dart in the eternal flame.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
1945
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard play “ordinary people” Laura Jesson and Dr. Alec Harvey, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2—practically another character—plays the crashing, roiling wave of love that takes them both by surprise. “Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter,” as the movie is formally billed, was based on Coward’s one-act play Still Life. It explores the deepening relationship between two married people of high morals who meet by chance in a train station. David Lean directed, pulling performances of understated passion from Johnson and Howard. Robert Krasker’s black-and-white cinematography, justly admired for its shadows and fog, wears a darkness both sooty and soft. Renunciation can be beautiful, but it can also be bleak. The ending—Johnson’s luminous eyes, Howard’s Arthurian brow—is wrenching.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
2005
It’s testament to our increasing enlightenment that this movie about the secret love affair between two cowboys ranks 12th among the highest-grossing romantic dramas of all time. It’s a heartbreaker. The late Heath Ledger, in the role of Ennis Del Mar, underplays stoicism—which takes some doing. No one can know him because he hardly knows himself, except for one thing: he knows that he loves Jack Twist. Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack is less frightened by their love. He wears his heart, well, not on his sleeve but close at hand. (Ennis won’t wear his heart anywhere.) And he has a vision of the life they could have together. But Ennis can’t go there. So close, so far. Their two shirts in the closet—one over the other on a single hanger—embody everything, profoundly.
- Audrey Hepburn’s Emotional Final Gift from Hubert de Givenchy
- Pain and Glory Finds Pedro Almodovar Looking Inward
- Francis Ford Coppola's Restored The Cotton Club Fixes a Historic Hollywood Mistake
CARMEN JONES
1954
“You go for me and I’m taboo. But if you’re hard to get I go for you.” That’s the motto of Carmen Jones, a red rose inside a red flame. One of the most successful updates of an opera, this artful film, conceived and directed by Otto Preminger, is not a conventional musical but more a drama with music. The melodies are from Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875, the words are by Oscar Hammerstein II, the time and place is North Carolina during W.W. II, and the cast is black, with a bewitching Dorothy Dandridge as Jones and Harry Belafonte as the love-obsessed Joe. This is romance as danger, as doom, a fate writ large in Carmen’s delicious wardrobe (designed by Mary Ann Nyberg). That sinuous coral dress with the slashes over the heart says it all. Dandridge was nominated for the Academy Award for best actress, a first for an African-American woman.
CASABLANCA
Love Story Full Movie
1942
Where to begin? There’s the great cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre. And the great moment: nervous, nervy locals silencing Nazi officers with a passionate rendition of “La Marseillaise.” And the great song: Dooley Wilson singing Herman Hupfeld’s “As Time Goes By.” There are the immortal lines: “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine,” and “We’ll always have Paris.” And the swift, punch-the-studio-time-clock transcendence of director Michael Curtiz. And the shocks of North African sun, of searchlights and moonlight in the night, courtesy of cinematographer Arthur Edeson. And there’s the last scene, blanketed in gray-velvet fog, in which a skein of glances looms the most powerful triangle in cinematic history. Bogart-Bergman-Henreid. But more than that: love-war-duty.
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
1996
World War II again. Zinc bars, cartography in Cairo, the glorious English, and love blossoming like a succulent in strange, dry places. The desert, the plane, the scarf, the cave, Ralph Fiennes in profile, and Kristin Scott Thomas stepping out of her bath—afternoon tea and the Wagnerian “Liebestod” of it all. Anthony Minghella’s movie, based on Michael Ondaatje’s stunningly voluptuous novel, works on the scale of grand opera. Little lives, historic upheaval, gargantuan passions. Tears, more tears, and we all die alone.
GHOST
1990
Commerce between the living and the dead is the stuff of ghost stories, but when that commerce is love we move into the realm of Orpheus. This genre—the supernatural romantic fantasy—contains masterpieces: 1947’s dashing and dansantThe Ghost and Mrs. Muir and the 1956 screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. Jerry Zucker’s Ghost is not a masterpiece, but it has an aching lyricism unique in contemporary film. Demi Moore, tremulous in a pixie cut, is at her loveliest. And the late Patrick Swayze is a concentrated presence, one of those actors the audience just feels for. He was perfectly cast in the kinetic coming-of-age romance Dirty Dancing, and he’s perfectly cast here, as the ardent ghost with unfinished business.
HOLIDAY
1938
While The Philadelphia Story (1940) enjoys most-favored status, its slightly older cousin, Holiday, which also stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, is a deeper, more poignant study of human nature. Derived from a play by Philip Barry (again like The Philadelphia Story), Holiday is The Age of Innocence in reverse. Grant is freethinking Johnny Case, a self-made success who wrestles with whether or not he should marry into stiff, snooty society. Doris Nolan’s Julia Seton is a strong temptation. But her older sister, Linda, more insecure and vulnerable—played with fire by Hepburn—is the soul match. She’d follow Johnny anywhere (as would we), but will he see that she’s the one?
I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING!
1945
The film critic Pauline Kael loved this Powell and Pressburger gem, and today it is a cult among poetic bluestockings. Set during W.W. II—as are so many of the movies on this list—it takes place in the stark and savage Scottish Hebrides, and fits into that classic genre in which a woman falls in love with the right man as she travels to wed the wrong one. Wendy Hiller fights the feeling, but the incomparable Roger Livesey, aided by wind and sea, gray seals and a golden eagle, is too much for her. The story and screenplay for this fairy tale—complete with a curse—were written in less than a week, clearly in a state of enchantment.
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
1934
The odds were against this one. Claudette Colbert was practically the last choice for the female lead. And Clark Gable did it only because MGM lent him, at a profit, to Columbia. Directed by Frank Capra, the movie ended up sweeping the top five Academy Awards of 1934. Colbert plays a bratty heiress on the lam without money, who, in exchange for help, gives her story to the roguish reporter played by Gable. Their adventures leave us with a gallery of indelible images: the Walls of Jericho (a motel room divided by a blanket on a string); the how-to-hitchhike lesson; the runaway bride, white tulle flying like a comet’s tail. With her man-in-the-moon beauty and 30s slouch, Colbert is more Pierrot than Columbine. She’s just right for Gable, her Harlequin. Their journey has the rough-and-tumble, seat-of-the-pants quality of commedia dell’arte, transplanted to the dusty roads of the Northeast Corridor.
THE LONG, HOT SUMMER
1958
His name is Ben Quick, he’s a barn burner, and he’s played by a sizzling Paul Newman. Yet it still takes all summer to woo and win the cool drink of lemonade that is Joanne Woodward in the role of Clara Varner. The magnificent Orson Welles is her father, and he wants Quick to marry Clara and bring fresh blood into the family. With Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and Anthony Franciosa rounding out this classy, randy romp through William Faulkner, it’s an Actors Studio contact high. Watch Newman with the sound off and his body telegraphs everything. Turn the sound back on and he’s a troubadour poet. “I’ll bet you was a mighty appealin’ little girl,” Ben tells Clara. “I’ll bet you knew where to look for robins’ eggs and blackberries. I’ll bet you had a doll with no head on it.” Irresistible.
LOVE AFFAIR
1939
AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
1957
It begins with two beautiful specimens: he a Sunday painter and she a nightclub singer, both engaged to wealthy others. Meeting aboard ship, they recognize that they are the same species—kept lightweights—and they begin to pal around. By the end of the crossing they are in love. But is it real and can they afford to stay together? They decide to rendezvous in six months, at the top of the Empire State Building. If both show, it’s a go. One doesn’t show . . . and both deepen. The first version stars the ineffable twosome Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne—Veuve Clicquot! The second version, not as light, perhaps a sauterne, has Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Either way—Leo McCarey directed both—have hankies ready for the final scene.
LOVE STORY
1970
Erich Segal’s screenplay came first and then Paramount Pictures asked him to write the novel, published as a preview to the movie, which premiered 10 months later. So it was studio synergy plus an Ivy League setting: Harvard, as in Ryan O’Neal, and Radcliffe, Ali MacGraw. Love Story has a famously blunt opening line, “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?” and an equally famous, if dubious, last line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” It’s a soap, no question, and despite the title there isn’t much story. Brains working overtime disdained the movie. Nevertheless, it was huge. The badinage between O’Neal and MacGraw was a fresh update on the classic rich-boy-loves-poor-girl formula, bringing the word “preppy” into the wider culture. And the death of Ali MacGraw’s Jenny gave a lot of people a good cathartic cry.
- Audrey Hepburn’s Emotional Final Gift from Hubert de Givenchy
- Pain and Glory Finds Pedro Almodovar Looking Inward
- Francis Ford Coppola's Restored The Cotton Club Fixes a Historic Hollywood Mistake
NOTORIOUS
1946
Has any director staged them with such a consummate blend of intensity, delicacy, and languor? In the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, the world ceases to exist outside a kiss. In this masterpiece, Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, attempts to escape both herself and the world through fast living. When she falls in love with Cary Grant’s T. R. Devlin, a government agent, she becomes a U.S. spy to be near him, to please him, and to punish herself—and him. Hitchcock laces this love story with poison: intonations of self-obliteration, self-sacrifice slipping into sadomasochism. As for the luminous black-and-white cinematography: a thousand shades of gray.
NOW, VOYAGER
1942
This was the favorite movie of America’s most inventive fashion designer, Geoffrey Beene. He loved Bette Davis’s transformation from a deeply dowdy (read: traumatized) 30-ish homebody to the glamorous woman of the world she becomes once she gets away from her soul-crushing mother. It happens on a cruise, her first travel on her own; and a stylish medley of hats and gloves, capes and veils, signals her thrilling metamorphosis. One of the catalysts for this change is a man she meets on board, the deeply decent yet unhappily married Paul Henreid. They become lovers, but the physical relationship must end when they both return to responsibilities at home. Their love, however, goes through its own metamorphosis, touching the sublime in sublimation, a shimmer captured in the unforgettable last line, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”
AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN
1982
It wasn’t going to end happily ever after. Director Taylor Hackford and star Richard Gere initially thought such an ending would betray the blue-collar, working-class dynamics of this scruffy story. Everyone here is trying to get up to the next rung: the young men enrolled in the U.S. Navy’s aviation officer candidate school, as well as the young women in the local mills, who date the prospective officers and dream of marrying one (which some do, oops, by getting pregnant). Gere is Zack Mayo, a hustler who has nowhere to go but up . . . into the clouds, he hopes, as a navy flier. Between the tough love of Sergeant Foley, played by Louis Gossett Jr., and the honest (not to mention undeniably hot) love of girlfriend Paula—Debra Winger, fresh off her success in Urban Cowboy—Gere grows in character. The rousing finale—chills—is earned.
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
1993
When a house—the manor and its manners—is more important than the people who run it, what happens to love? Where does a life “in service” end and a private life begin? These are the questions that haunt The Remains of the Day, the Merchant Ivory film based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize–winning novel of 1989. The answers to these questions have consequences that are personal, of course, but also political. Anthony Hopkins, as the English butler Stevens—chief of staff for Lord Darlington—is quietly loved by the housekeeper Miss Kenton, played by Emma Thompson. He is so caught up in correctness that he can’t see a crime occurring under his nose. When Stevens finally opens his eyes, and his heart, he understands—as Edith Wharton’s Newland Archer did before him—that being correct is sometimes the wrong answer, a crime against oneself.
ROMAN HOLIDAY
1953
Audrey Hepburn would go on to star in a slew of chaste and charming fairy-tale romances—including Sabrina, Funny Face, and My Fair Lady—but this was the movie that made her a Hollywood princess. Certainly her peculiar blend of innocence, gravity, and grace was perfect for the runaway royalty she plays here. Tired of airless hotel rooms and state ceremony, Princess Ann escapes into the night and spends the next day experiencing Rome with a good-natured guy, Gregory Peck, and his pal Eddie Albert. She doesn’t know that they are newspaper reporters who are scooping her story, and Peck doesn’t know that he’s going to fall in love with this princess. The ending is all in the eyes and unspeakably affecting.
SAY ANYTHING . . .
1989
Looking like Elvis Presley’s baby-faced younger brother (if he had one), John Cusack is utterly endearing in this little love story with an outsize fan base. He plays average guy Lloyd Dobler (which makes you think of “dabbler”), who has just graduated from high school and is besotted with Diane Court (Ione Skye), the shy class valedictorian. He asks her out, and on a lark she says yes. It’s kismet, and this dewy, poignant pair of lovebirds coos through the summer until Diane must fly to England for a fellowship. The movie marked Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, and it plays like a series of set pieces, all of them closing in on the human heart. Lili Taylor as Corey, Lloyd’s close friend, is hilarious and beatific at once.
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
1995
Every movie based on the work of Jane Austen is romantic, and God knows there are viewers who still haven’t recovered from Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in 1995’s BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. But that year also brought forth Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee, from a screenplay by Emma Thompson. In its fiercely composed, almost metaphysical landscapes, its brushstrokes of deep darkness, the movie invokes and then challenges the high Romanticism that is one of the novel’s themes. The cast is showstopping. A young Kate Winslet is the too passionately romantic Marianne, Thompson is the too selfless Elinor, and Greg Wise, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman are their too divine love interests. So let’s give the BBC—with Firth and Jennifer Ehle (the definitive Elizabeth Bennet!)—the prize for best Pride and Prejudice. Which leaves 1995’s Sense and Sensibility to win best Jane Austen film to date.
THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
1940
Charm, charm, and more charm. Set in a gift shop in Budapest, where there’s much ado about a music box for cigarettes/candy, Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedy is a gift in itself, offering up delightful performances when opened. The Austrian sheers on the store windows tuck the viewer in to 99 cozy minutes as elfin Margaret Sullavan spars with the heartbreakingly young and elegant James Stewart (the acting chops are already there—the touchy cross-currents playing about the cloudless face). They irritate each other at every turn, these two co-workers, and have no idea that they also happen to be each other’s “Dear Friend,” anonymous pen pals, sharing their hearts through the mail. Frank Morgan, that grand MGM staple, turns in a touching performance as their temperamental boss, Hugo Matuschek. The script is a delicious Hungarian pastry. And the last reel pure joy!
THE WAY WE WERE
1973
You can view it as a vanity production if you want, but this movie with almost no plot—it’s more of a big-budget home movie following the fates of a few college classmates from the 30s to the 50s—strangely holds up. Barbra Streisand’s Katie is the ugly-duckling campus Communist who loves Robert Redford’s golden-boy writer, Hubbell, from afar. After graduation she goes glossy and bags Redford, who, like a postwar F. Scott Fitzgerald (which makes Streisand a sort of crazy Zelda), takes her to Hollywood, where he writes screenplays and she gets all activist again, this time about the blacklist. Katie’s tugging insecurity about her looks is the wrinkle in the romance: she can’t believe a beauty like Hubbell could actually love her. They break up without ever discussing why, crushing the hearts of ugly ducklings everywhere who saw themselves in Katie—including Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who really wasn’t as pretty as Big was handsome but was eventually smart enough to know that she didn’t need to be.
- Audrey Hepburn’s Emotional Final Gift from Hubert de Givenchy
- Pain and Glory Finds Pedro Almodovar Looking Inward
- Francis Ford Coppola's Restored The Cotton Club Fixes a Historic Hollywood Mistake
WORKING GIRL
1988
Harrison Ford as an aw-shucks Apollo. Sigourney Weaver like Hera from on high. And Melanie Griffith a working-class mortal who believes she can succeed in high finance. “I have a head for business,” she tells Ford, “and a bod for sin.” A Cinderella story set in the world of mergers and acquisitions, Working Girl is yet another romance of transformation, but there’s nothing passive about Tess McGill, the character played by Griffith. When her boss—Weaver’s Katharine Parker—is laid up in Europe with a broken leg, Tess smooths her Staten Island perm into a classic French twist (a nod to mom Tippi Hedren), puts on a power suit (remember shoulder pads?), and takes a meeting (pretending to be Parker’s colleague) with Ford’s Jack Trainer. It’s a well-built little film with a great supporting cast, a stirring finale, and, in Ford and Griffith, an adorable update on the classic rich-poor couple of the 30s.