A Cinephile’s Guide To Valentine’s Day Weekend
Ten Great Non-Traditional Romantic Films To Watch This Weekend- And Where To Find Them
Why leave the house? Film critic Jack Hanley of HanleyOnFilm.com selects ten romantic films to hole up and share with that special cinephile person in your life this weekend.
QUEEN & SLIM (2019) Dir. Melina Matsoukas
This criminally under-seen masterwork is less a “doomed lovers-on-the-run” odyssey and more a fugitive ballad for a nation in crisis. It positively aches with mythic tragic inevitability, sure- but is ANYTHING sexier than a fierce expression of love as sanctuary, as transcendent fidelity, and as resistance? Because at the end of the day- and in THIS MOMENT- is there ANYTHING more romantic than finding your eternal “ride-or-die” to fight the system beside?!?
(Streaming on Peacock and Prime / Free on Tubi)
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964) Dir. Jacques Demy
The walls lacquered in heartbreak pastels. The technicolor heartache. The operatic New Wave swings. Catherine Deneuve’s longing glances. Sorry, LA LA LAND…the OG still did it best, and while your melodramatic mileage may vary, if you’re not weeping by that gas station on Christmas Eve, you may need to get your vitals checked.
(Streaming on HBO and Criterion / Free on Kanopy)
THE APARTMENT (1960) Dir. Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder delivers perhaps the most satirical love story in American cinematic history with THE APARTMENT. This is NO meet-cute, but rather a RESCUE- where two wounded casualties of American corporate capitalism find- and save- each other through the radical proposition that true love is steeped not in fantasy but in decency, idealism, and equality.
Jack Lemmon instantly reminds you why he just may be America’s greatest actor (and most of his contemporaries thought so) and Shirley MacLaine steals the show with the performance of a lifetime. Fair warning- you WILL fall in love.
This is Wilder at his most subversive- proffering that the mere act of shutting the door on cynicism and keeping it open for love is both radical and beautiful. Come for the romantic melancholy, but stay for the razor sharp indictment of corporate America that dares to suggest that in late-stage capitalism, the most heroic and romantic gesture left is INTEGRITY.
(Streaming on Prime and MGM+ / Free on Kanopy)
PAST LIVES (2023) Dir. Celine Song
Have you ever been haunted by a film? Celine Song’s PAST LIVES is romance as restraint — that rare love story defined not by what happens, but by what almost did. Lee and Yoo are simply mesmerizing, conveying moments, exquisite longing (both personal and cultural), and the entire metaverse of the unrealized through glances held a bit too long and revelations almost confessed.
Song’s quiet meditation on migration and memory deftly folds decades and lifetimes into one melancholic reunion that ultimately cares less about who we choose as a partner and more about how we choose a life…all while honoring the ghost of the one that might have been.
(Streaming on HBO and Prime)
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017) Dir. Luca Guadagnino
Guadagnino’s coming-of-age masterwork understands — like the Bard’s star-crossed lovers before it — that you will NEVER feel the pangs of love, desire, or loss quite as viscerally and violently as you do when you are young- when every furtive glance somehow feels apocalyptic and world-changing.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME reframes first love into a coming-of-age WOUND, capturing both the dizzy certainty that this feeling is singular, and magical, and eternal even as it is doomed- like all first loves- to slip away. And that final firelit ending? If ONLY I had a smoking Michael Stuhlbarg to turn to in 8th grade…
(Streaming on Prime and Paramount)
CITY LIGHTS (1931) Dir. Charlie Chaplin
CITY LIGHTS unabashedly reframes romance as an act of radical humanism- where love quietly transcends the brutal realities of class and social division. Chaplin, ever the champion of the outsider, roots for human dignity above all else, INSISTING that tenderness and empathy belong to EVERYONE, regardless of status.
When the film’s final moment of realization- perhaps the most famous romantic single shot in cinematic history- happens, it lands like a revolution. Just two human beings finally “meeting” each other honestly for the first time, stripped of fantasy, class illusion, and performance.
The enduring power of Chaplin was always his profoundly humanist worldview…this is love as empathy, and the radical notion that dignity and simply being truly SEEN is far more intimate than being desired.
(Streaming on HBO Max and Criterion / Free on Kanopy)
FALLEN LEAVES (2023) Dir. Aki Kaurismäki
Kaurismäki’s latest (and sadly, perhaps last) is a deeply plaintive and poetic love letter to the human connection in an inhumane world that has no right being so damn charming and optimistic…beautiful and Chaplinesque in its unabashed love for humanity.
Of COURSE my favorite Finnish filmmaker frames his social-realist rom-com around the transformative power of cinema…of COURSE you knew EXACTLY what name the dog would have at the end…of COURSE I cried. You will too.
(Streaming on Prime and Mubi)
PERFECT DAYS (2023) Dir. Wim Wenders
Who says romance requires two people? PERFECT DAYS explores the radical act of falling in love with the world, with your life, and with yourself. Instead of romance as pursuit or longing for another, Wim Wenders proposes a different kind of eroticism: intimacy with time, routine, and the fragile beauty of an ordinary life in which simple deliberate acts like cleaning, listening to music, or watching light move through trees operate like gestures of devotion.
But is it romantic? In EVERY sense of the word. It quietly reframes romance as a love affair with existence itself- a tender reminder that sometimes the single most radical act is choosing to fall in love with your own life- and everything that makes it up- one small ritual at a time.
(Streaming on Hulu and Prime / Free on Kanopy)
Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (2001) Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
Sometimes, it’s not about the agápē but the Érōs- and at first glance, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece meditation on lust and intimacy masquerades as a sex comedy road movie- all bravado, hormones, and youthful recklessness. But beneath the sweat and abandon lies one of the most quietly devastating romances of the twenty-first century…a love story not merely between its three protagonists, but in that fleeting sacred space between fleeting youth and the unbearable awareness of adulthood.
It is an unapologetic tribute to those rare and brief openings in time where we see each other CLEARLY before life and time pull us apart. Romance, in Cuarón’s hands, is the lingering ache that remains after the road trip ends.
(Streaming on Prime and Criterion / Free on Kanopy)
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000) Dir. Wong Kar-wai
The one to rule them all. No notes.
(Streaming on Criterion / Free on Kanopy)
Jack Hanley is a film scholar, podcaster, and critic based in Boulder, CO. He is a co-conspirator with the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Slamdance’s Indies Awards, and the Boulder International Film Festival among others. He is one-half of Blindspotting: A Film Discovery Podcast and the founder of the Reel Horrors Short Film Festival. Find him at Kinophilia on Medium and at HanleyOnFilm.com