14 Most Romantic Movies

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Feeling romantically challenged? Or maybe you’re looking for some movies to share with your Valentine. Bring out the hankies and ice the champagne, if these 14 movies don’t put you in the mood, nothing will.

14. Pretty Woman

The ultimate chick flick.

 

Maybe you don’t buy the idea of a streetwalker winning the heart of a handsome millionaire and living happily ever after. Apparently the film’s makers didn’t either. They set out to write a much darker movie about prostitution and drugs. They ended up with a movie in which the handsome prince (Richard Gere) strikes a strictly non-sexual deal with a hooker with a heart of gold (Julia Roberts), who becomes a fairy princess after dressing up in a gown from Rodeo Drive.

Don’t think about it too hard. Just relax and enjoy the movie that made Julia Roberts a superstar.

13. Morocco

 

She enslaved every man in sight until she was enslaved by love.

In her first American film, Marlene Dietrich plays an adventuress who trades her sexuality for gifts from men–until she meets French Foreign Legionnaire Gary Cooper.

The movie’s famous today mainly for the scene in which Dietrich, clad in a white tie and tails, plants a kiss on another woman, but it’s the last scene that will set hearts aflutter.

The legionnaires are assembled at the town gate for the march out of town. A mass of women and children congregate behind them, ready to follow their men through the desert. Dietrich stands apart with her wealthy lover. The drum beats. The men march out. Their women follow. Then Dietrich starts to walk. The scene is silent, save for sound of the wind whipping up the desert sand. Marlene removes her shoes and runs to catch up. Fade to black.

Pure romance.

12. When Harry Met Sally

 

Can a man and a woman be friends without sex getting in the way?

Not in When Harry Met Sally, although the eponymous pair manage to remain platonic for 12 years. Harry (Billy Crystal) meets Sally (Meg Ryan) when the two drive from Chicago to New York upon college graduation. They meet several times over the years and eventually become friends. As friends, they help one another through a variety of relationships until …

11. To Have and Have Not

You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow.

This is the movie in which Bogey met Bacall. And by all accounts life on the set was every bit as full of sexual sparks as their appearances together on screen. She was only 19, he was married–and smitten. But you don’t have to know the backstory to enjoy the film, which is a thrilling mixture of film noir, adventure and intrigue.

 

 

10. Romeo and Juliet

The first film to use teenagers to play the teenage lovers, this 1968 movie may also be one of the most beautiful films ever made of a Shakespearean play. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey were 17 and 15, still a couple of years older than the lovers in the play, when the movie was made. Some reviewers criticized the actors for their inexperience with the material, but the sight of two besotted teenagers spouting those famous lines really adds dimension to the story. As in the famous balcony scene:

 

 

9. Roman Holiday

A modern-day fairytale, Roman Holiday is the movie that made Audrey Hepburn a star. She plays Princess Ann, who’s on a goodwill tour of Europe, cutting ribbons and giving speeches. One day she escapes from the clutches of her handlers to explore Rome on her own.

 

She meets up with Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) and Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert), a reporter and a photographer. Ann doesn’t know that her companions are journalists, but they know who she is. Joe plans to sell the princess’s story to the highest bidder, but after 24 hours together, love wins over money and Joe changes his mind. Still, the two of them aren’t destined to live happily ever after: Princess Ann must return to her duties.

8. Annie Hall

There’s an old joke .. two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ‘em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly. The… the other important joke, for me, is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud’s “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” and it goes like this - I’m paraphrasing - um, “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” That’s the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

He’s a neurotic New York Jew. She’s a neurotic Midwestern WASP. Together, they drive each other crazy. When they’re apart, they’re crazy too. A romance about a relationship full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and over much too quickly.

7. Philadelphia Story

Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart in their prime. Need I say more? The opening scene sets the tone:

 

 

Haughty heiress Tracy Lord (Hepburn) ditches husband C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) for a self-made man (John Howard). Tabloid reporter Macauley Connor (Stewart) and his photographer sidekick, played to perfection by Ruth Hussey, plan to cover the upcoming nuptials. Hijinks ensue.A synopsis doesn’t do it justice. See it; you won’t be sorry.

6. From Here to Eternity

Karen Holmes: Why don’t you tell the truth, you just don’t want the responsibility. You’re probably not even in love with me.
Sergeant Milton Warden: You’re crazy! I wish I didn’t love ya; maybe I can enjoy life again.

A war story, buddy movie, coming-of-age flick and love story wrapped into one, From Here to Eternity would make the list on the strength of that famous kiss on the beach alone.

 

It’s a never-a-dull-moment movie with a phenomenal cast. Burt Lancaster is a sergeant married to the Army who has an affair with his commanding officer’s wife, played by Deborah Kerr. Montgomery Clift is a classic hardcase: A bugler and former championship boxer who won’t step back into the ring no matter how much grief he gets from his commanders. Donna Reed is a prostitute with genteel pretensions. Frank Sinatra is the happy-go-lucky friend who crosses the wrong man when he tangles with sadistic prison guard Ernest Borgnine. How could you go wrong?

And that kiss:

 

5. Titanic

 

I’m the king of the world!

The ultimate blockbuster, Titanic cost over $200 million to make. Its special effects are dazzling, its sets lavish and its period costumes are gorgeous. But it’s the romance between Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) that had teenage girls lining up at the box office to see the movie again and again.

4. Brief Encounter

It all started on an ordinary day in the most ordinary place in the world - the refreshment room at Milford Junction.

Probably the chastest movie discussed here, Brief Encounter concerns a middle-aged couple who don’t commit adultery.

 

Middle-aged housewife Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets married doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) in a train station; she gets something in her eye, he removes it. Their relationship develops over succeeding weeks–a trip into town is part of their weekly routine. A friendship develops. And then it becomes something more. Their one attempt to consummate their relationship is a disaster. Soon after they part forever.

Keep a box of tissues nearby.

3. An Officer and a Gentleman

I got nowhere else to go!

 

He’s an aimless loner who’s never amounted to much. She works in a paper mill. Throw in an ass-kicking drill sergeant, a sensitive friend and a calculating gold-digger and you’ve got a romance for the ages.

It’s the performances by Richard Gere, Debra Winger and Louis Gossett Jr. that raise this romantic coming of age film above its peers. Gere has never been better as Zack, a nasty piece of work at the beginning of the story who manages to make something out of himself against all odds or expectations. Debra Winger is sexy, yet sweet and vulnerable. And Louis Gossett Jr just about steals the show as Sergeant Foley, who shows Zack no mercy on the training field. By the time Gere sweeps Winger into his arms to the tune of Joe Cocker singing “Up Where We Belong,” you’ll be in tears. In a good way.

 

2. Moonstruck

Rose: “Do you love him, Loretta?”
Loretta: “Ma, I love him awful.”
Rose: “Oh, God, that’s too bad.”

Cher plays Loretta, a Brooklyn widow whose first marriage ended in tragedy thanks, she thinks, to the couple’s City Hall ceremony. Though she doesn’t love him, Loretta agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). But complications ensue when Loretta becomes smitten with Johnny’s brother , Ronny, played by Nicholas Cage.

 

Everyone in this comic opera of a movie is moonstruck. Roger Ebert captures it best:

The most enchanting quality about “Moonstuck” is the hardest to describe, and that is the movie’s tone. Reviews of the movie tend to make it sound like a madcap ethnic comedy, and that it is. But there is something more here, a certain bittersweet yearning that comes across as ineffably romantic, and a certain magical quality that is reflected in the film’s title.

1. Casablanca

 

They’ll always have Paris.

Its plot is laughable: If Czech patriot Victor Laszlo could just get a hold of those letters of transit signed by General DeGaulle, he could travel anywhere and the Nazis couldn’t lay a hand on him. And a scene in which an entire nightclub sings “La Marseillaise” in defiance of the jack-booted Nazi thugs who occupy Casablanca would be incredibly hokey in any other movie.

And yet it works.

Humphrey Bogart plays Rick, an embittered American saloon owner sitting out WWII in Casablanca. Then out “of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world,” in walks Ilsa Lund, the luminous Ingrid Bergman. Everyone in the cast is remarkable, the bit players as well as the stars, but Casablanca wouldn’t be Casablanca without Ingrid Bergman, who positively glows as the woman who’s both the ideal helpmate and the ultimate lover.

Take a look at this scene, in which Rick first discovers Ilsa is in Casablanca:

 

 

Is it any wonder he’s smitten?

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