Best Valentine’s Day Movies

Second only perhaps to Halloween, Valentine’s Day is a great day for watching movies. Whether you’re in a relationship or not, who wants to brave the crowds of couples paying for expensive dinners when you can stay in, have a home-cooked meal, and pop in a movie? Here now, two V-Day movie lists – one for those who have found real love, and one for the loveless (but not at all bitter about it).

Top 10 Valentine’s Day Movies for the In Love

1. Harold and Maude
2. Annie Hall

Strangely enough, most of the movies on this list end tragically or ambiguously – perhaps following in the footsteps of the all-time classic romance, Romeo & Juliet. Annie Hall is no exception, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a movie for lovers – the relationship between Diane Keaton and Woody Allen is, whatever its resolution, a celebration of true, honest love, for all its difficulties and complications.

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
4. Casablanca
5. Say Anything…

The romance in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut outshines his subsequent work in Jerry Maguire, perhaps because Crowe provides such a sharp, moving contrast between John Cusack and Ione Skye’s love and the collapse of Skye’s relationship with her father. Say Anything… is by far the best of the ’80’s teen romances, and remains one of the most intelligent teen movies ever made.

6. Once
7. Brokeback Mountain

Another tragic love story – tragic not because the love fails but because it remains so painfully, unalterably strong in circumstances (again echoing Romeo & Juliet) that don’t allow for it.

8. Before Sunrise
9. Punch Drunk Love

The love between Adam Sandler and Emily Watson in Punch Drunk Love is weird and inexplicable, but that’s part of what makes it so charming and identifiable. The intensity between the two when they are lying in bed whispering (bizarre and violent) nothings to each other matches anything that ever appeared on screen between Hepburn and Tracy or Bogart and Bacall.

10. Love Actually

Top 10 Valentine’s Day Movies for the Out of Love

1. Fatal Attraction
2. Closer

The ultimate love-is-phony movie. When you see a couple falling in love and you feel yourself getting jealous, pop in Closer to see all you’re not missing (including Julia Roberts at her most potty-mouthed).

3. Dial ‘M’ for Murder
4. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
5. In the Company of Men

Whether you’re single or you just hate heterosexual white male culture, this is the movie for you. Aaron Eckhart delivers an amazing performance as a cocky, cruel, conscience-less office worker manipulating everybody and everything around him.

6. Carnal Knowledge
7. Kramer vs. Kramer
8. Network

Network is not really a movie about romance, but William Holden’s affair with Faye Dunaway and the subsequent collapse of his marriage gives the film a beating heart. The brief appearance by Beatrice Straight as Holden’s wife earned her an Academy Award despite its brevity, and it is a human, searing monologue about the cost of betrayal and infidelity.

9. The Rules of Attraction
10. O

Based on Shakespeare’s Othello, O is in many ways the opposite of Romeo & Juliet – the relationship here collapses not because of the strength of the love but because of its weakness, which allows Mehki Phifer’s character to succumb to paranoia and mistrust.