from imdb:
Antonio is a seductive, charismatic Sicilian living illegally in New York. He wanders from job to job, lives as a squatter and enjoys a carefree romantic tryst with a wealthy art dealer. When he falls in love with Ellen, a strong-willed radio talk-show host who is set to move to Paris within a few days, he decides he must find a way to keep her from leaving. Meanwhile, Antonio’s friend Apu faces a love challenge of his own. Apu is a young Indian-turned-New Yorker who was sent from his homeland with his family’s life savings to find the American dream of success and fulfillment. He works hard at odds jobs– from being a guinea pig in a drug-testing lab to dubbing porno films. Then his life is completely uprooted on the day his pre-arranged wife from India arrives in New York–the woman chosen by their families when they were children, one he hasn’t seen since he was 8 and she was 4. Apu is caught between the old world and the new–trying to find love and happiness within the confines of his pre-determined destiny. The film is about what happens when cultures clash–about expectations and reality, dreams of love and money, and life when the timing is way off. Written by {[email protected]}Read More »
Romance
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Emanuele Crialese – Once We Were Strangers (1997)
1991-2000ComedyEmanuele CrialeseRomanceUSA -
Yves Pelletier – Les Aimants AKA Love and Magnets (2004)
2001-2010CanadaComedyRomanceYves PelletierMontreal Mirror wrote:
People tend to be cynical and derisive towards romantic comedies. Personally, I’m a softie and seeing people fall in love on screen always touches me. Then again, I’m aware that most entries in the rom-com genre are derivative and idiotic. But once in a blue moon, you find one that’s surprisingly original and intelligent. Les Aimants is such a film.
After five years abroad, Julie (Isabelle Blais) comes back to Montreal and crashes with her sister Jeanne (Sylvie Moreau), a woman who lies as she breathes. Jeanne is engaged to Noël (David Savard), a workaholic who’s never home, so they communicate through messages they leave on the refrigerator. When Jeanne leaves for a week of adultery with theremin virtuoso Manu (Emmanuel Bilodeau), she asks Julie to cover up for her by responding to Noël’s fridge notes. But Julie decides to get “positive revenge” on her seemingly heartless sister by making the messages she leaves more romantic…Read More »
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Ferzan Ozpetek – La Finestra di fronte aka The Window Opposite (2003)
2001-2010DramaFerzan ÖzpetekItalyRomanceTurkey
Giovanna is a bookeeper in a company which packs chickens. She is married to a man who has a precarious job. First she starts being curious about a young man who lives in the block opposite hers, and then she falls in love with him. The relationship between the two becomes much stronger when she starts to find out more about him from an old man who bursts into their lives. The old man, obsessed with the memories of some things that happened n the long past autumn of 1943, has lost his memory and finds refuge in Giovanna.
“Facing Windows (La Finestra di fronte)” is like a very European and more sophisticated take on “The Notebook,” as it shifts between romantic and culinary past and present through the in-and-out consciousness of an elderly man. The “Rear Window” eroticism is just one element that accidentally brings together tangled, stymied lives swirling around lovely, exhausted, frustrated chef, wife and mother Giovanna Mezzogiorno, where each child, man, woman, friend and neighbor has separate priorities and fantasies that annoying real life interferes with, from the practical to the political.Read More » -
Diane Kurys – Les Enfants du siècle AKA The Children of the Century (1999)
Drama1991-2000Diane KurysFranceRomancePlot summary from IMDB:
The only thing more outrageous than French novelist George Sand’s torrid love affair with the decadent author Alfred de Musset and her affinity for wearing men’s clothing, was the content of her writing. Though Sand (otherwise known as the Baroness Dudevant) smoked cigars and cross-dressed, it was the boldness of her writing on issues such as the abstinence of marriage and women’s frigidity that most contributed to the scandalous reputation she earned in French literary circles. When she met Alfred de Musset, the most gifted poet of his generation, the two quickly became a public cause celebrity while their work would go on to become some of the finest examples of 19th century romanticism.Read More » -
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi – Toki o kakeru shôjo AKA The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983)
1981-1990JapanNobuhiko ObayashiRomanceSci-FiQuote:
Tomoyo Harada is an average student in high school. She has an old friend Toshinori Omi who goes to the same school, and Ryoichi Takayanagi who is also her classmate, but is not quite the old friend she thinks he is. One day after a routine cleaning of the school’s chem lab, she starts to experience a time warp in her life where she experiences the same event multiple times. Quite by accident, she is getting drawn into the plan that came from the future. She soon discovers why she is experiencing the time warp.Read More » -
Stanley Haynes – Carnival (1946)
1941-1950DramaRomanceStanley HaynesUnited KingdomPlot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
Of the many films (English and American) bearing the title Carnival, only one was based on the Compton MacKenzie novel of the same name. This 1946 melodrama stars Sally Gray as a 19th century ballet dancer who makes an unfortunate career move by marrying a taciturn Cornish farmer (Bernard Miles). Sally soon longs for the bright lights of the big city, and for the arms of her artist lover (Michael Wilding). Her husband is all too aware of this; and when the lover comes calling to renew the affair, the husband shoots Gray to death. The first film version of Compton MacKenzie’s Carnival was filmed in 1931 as Dance Pretty Lady. Read More » -
Kurt Meisel – Tragödie einer Leidenschaft (1949)
1941-1950DramaGermanyKurt MeiselRomanceWhen she was a little girl, Liuba came to town with her widowed mother to live in the block of flats owned by her aunt Anna Iwanowna. The wealthy and cold-hearted Anna Iwanowna barely accepted them as tenants. And no sooner did Liuba’s mother die than she wanted to send her niece to the orphanage. Fortunately, Pawlin, Anna Iwanowna’s janitor, decided to adopt her and he brought her up with affection. When she grew up, the beautiful Liuba fell in love with her aunt’s son, Dodja, a good-looking but profligate army officer. Wishing nothing more than an affair with Liuba, Dodja did not hesitate to play the comedy of love to her. When she realized what Dodja was really after, Liuba was devastated and in desperation accepted to marry Pawlin, her benefactor, who had been infatuated with her for years. Alas, in the middle of the wedding party Dodja danced with Liuba and eloped with her. Written by Guy Bellinger Read More »
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Alfonso Cuarón – Sólo con tu pareja AKA Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991)
1991-2000Alfonso CuarónComedyMexicoRomanceQuote:
The hero of Alfonso Cuarón’s “Sólo Con Tu Pareja” is Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a young man living alone in a roomy Mexico City apartment with a tedious job writing advertising copy and a hyperactive romantic life. Apparently and perhaps not quite plausibly irresistible to women, he is also unable to resist them, which is believable enough, since the women in this movie favor garter belts, half-slips and other kinds of retro-sexy lingerie, which they seem happy to display, or to remove, in Tomás’s presence.Read More » -
Andrew Haigh – 45 Years (2015)
Drama2011-2020Andrew HaighRomanceUnited KingdomPlot
Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) and her husband Geoff (Tom Courtenay) had to cancel the party for their 40th anniversary at short notice when Geoff underwent bypass surgery. The comfortably off, left-wing, childless, provincial couple now have a week to go before a replacement party to celebrate their 45th anniversary. Theoretically, this week should just involve planning, dress purchasing and a bit of social fretting. This is not to be: shattering news arrives for Geoff from the Swiss authorities, explaining that the perfectly preserved body of his ex-girlfriend, Katya, has been found, 50 years after she slipped into an Alpine crevasse. From the moment the news is received Kate can ‘smell Katya’s perfume in the room’ and her perspective on their marriage changes forever. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)Read More »








