If you’re a sappy romantic, like us, this month of love is a great excuse to revisit some of the greatest love stories to grace the silver screen. Here are a few of our favourites, including (hopefully!) a few new ones to add to your watch list.
Consistently ranked among history’s greatest films, Casablanca is love story set in World War II. Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, is an American ex-pat and nightclub owner in the French city of Casablanca. He runs into an old flame, Ilsa Lund, payed by Ingrid Bergman, who is now married to a Czech resistance leader. But Rick’s position soon forces him to choose between saving Ilsa’s husband or running away with her.
The film was released in 1942, at the height of the war, but its legacy has endured. One critic said of the film it was “true yesterday, true today, true tomorrow.”
James Cameron’s magnum opus and the film that launched Leonardo DiCaprio’s career into orbit, Titanic features a starry-eyed orphan, DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson, who falls for a wealthy American, Kate Winslet’s Rose DeWitt, on the maiden voyage of history’s most famous ill-fated ship.
Yet, even amid the massive spectacle, the gargantuan budget, and lengthy run time, it was the love story at the heart of the film that held it all together. Roger Ebert called the film “flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted, and spellbinding.”
A coming of age film and Timothée Chalamet’s first starring role, Call Me By Your Name is a gorgeous love story set in the Italian countryside. Chalamet’s Elio, a precocious 17 year old, is spending the summer in a villa with his parents, who are academics, when they invite a 24-year-old graduate student, Oliver, whom Elio falls for.
Beautifully shot and scored, the film offers an intimate and moving, if controversial, portrayal of first love. As one critic put it, it “transcends the same-sex dynamic of its central couple.”
A quirky and charming indie flick, (500) Days of Summer stars Joseph Gordon Levitt as Tom Hansen, a greeting card writer and aspiring architect, who falls in love with Summer Finn, played by Zooey Deschanel. The catch is, Summer does not believe in love. What follows is a fun-to-watch and intelligent story about modern relationships, set against the stunning architectural backdrop of Los Angeles.
(500) Days of Summer was consistently ranked among the top films of 2009. “Of course they meet. Of course they fall for each other. Of course there are problems,” one critic wrote. “But what's remarkable about 500 Days is how the film explores new ways to tell the world's oldest story.”
For the foreign film buffs, In The Mood For Love is a 2000 film by acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. It stars Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as two neighbours in an apartment complex who develop feelings for one another after they learn that their spouses are having an affair together. The year it was released one critic at the New York Times called it “probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year.”
Peter Walker of The Guardian called it his "favourite film,” and wrote that it provides "profound and moving reflections on life's fundamentals. It's a film about, yes, love; but also betrayal, loss, missed opportunities, memory, the brutality of time's passage, loneliness—the list goes on.”
This epic western begins around the First World War and follows the lives of three brothers and one woman over the next 50 years. There's the youngest, the naive and principled Samuel (Henry Thomas); the eldest, the pragmatic and shrewd Alfred (Aidan Quinn); and the middle son, Tristan (Brad Pitt), the most formidable, rebellious, and charismatic of the three. They are watched over by their father, played superbly by Anthony Hopkins.
After Samuel’s fiancé, Susanna, arrives at their ranch, the story begins. What follows is a tale full of tragedy and triumph set in a part of Montana that looks like something straight out of a painting.
This Richard Linklater film begins on a train. Céline, played by Julie Delpy, is returning to university in Paris, while Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, is on his way to catch a flight home to the U.S. out of Vienna. After just a few minutes on the train, Jesse manages to convince Céline to get off before her stop and spend one night with him in Vienna. They roam the streets of the old city discussing love, life, and religion not knowing whether they will ever see one another again after the night is over.
“Just once, for a single day, Jesse and Céline have given life the sort of shape and charge that until now they have found only in fiction, and may never find again,” wrote one critic. There were two similarly well received sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, that catch up with the characters years later.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is the great love story of our time. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde — they have nothing on Shrek and Fiona.
In this animated classic, the titular swamp-dwelling ogre (played with a Scottish accent for some reason by Mike Myers) is sent on a quest with his loyal donkey (the inimitable Eddie Murphy) to rescue princess Fiona so she can marry little Lord Farquad. But she’s supposed to be rescued by her prince charming, which Shrek is not.
“A witty and fractured fairy tale,”Shrek remains uproariously funny and endlessly quotable. Its timeless message about love and beauty is delivered in unforgettable fashion.
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