‘Full of emotional wisdom’: Guardian writers on the best movie romances you might not have seen

The Annihilation of Fish

It’s the first rule of romcoms that opposites attract, and you can’t imagine two more different lovers than Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), a spark plug of a dame convinced that she is in a relationship with the 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini, and Fish (James Earl Jones), a gentle giant who spends his spare time wrestling a demon that only he can see. That makes for some of the film’s funniest moments, like when Poinsettia ruins a Madama Butterfly opera performance by loudly singing along to the aria. Charles Burnett’s touching film is about how Fish and Poinsettia find refuge with each other that lets them emerge from the fantasies protecting them from the real world’s cruelty, and they find a kind of late-in-life puppy love over dinner dates, cozy sleepovers and card games at their Barbary Lane-like boarding house. When I saw the restoration last 14 February, the theater was filled with couples who, like my boyfriend and I, seemed cozied up just a little closer than usual. Owen Myers

• The Annihilation of Fish is available on the Criterion Channel in the US

The More the Merrier

I first saw The More the Merrier as a tween, and I fear it set completely unrealistic standards for all of my ensuing adult relationships. (Thanks for the education, Turner Classic Movies.) Joe (Joel McCrea) and Connie (Jean Arthur) are two strangers forced to live together in DC thanks to a second world war-era housing shortage. Connie is a straight-shooting working woman engaged to a real dud of a bureaucratic stooge. Joe is a raffish sergeant with a nagging crush on his new roommate. One night they walk home together, and Connie tries to distract herself from their obvious magnetism by babbling about her betrothed, who has the deeply unsexy name of Mr Pendergast. As Joe pulls Connie close, we watch her negotiate a desire for him against the practicality of Pendergast. You can guess who wins. The ensuing stoop makeup session gets a lot of attention (especially on YouTube, where it has been dubbed “one of the most erotic love scenes ever”). I agree, though I prefer a more subtly sexy moment: the meet-cute, where Joe walks in on Connie while she’s wearing a face full of moisturizer. She’s embarrassed; it’s played for laughs. But then we linger on Joe’s face, awash with that first jolt of falling for someone, clearly unbothered by how she’s un-done. If love doesn’t look like that, I don’t want it. Alaina Demopoulos

• The More the Merrier is available to rent digitally in the US

Libeled Lady

Despite receiving an Oscar nomination for best picture in 1936, Libeled Lady doesn’t seem to be a go-to citation for classic screwball romance. Maybe it’s because stars Myrna Loy and William Powell are better known for their Thin Man series of detective comedies; or because their co-star Spencer Tracy’s best-known romcoms often feature Katharine Hepburn, absent here; or because it came out the same year as the seemingly more beloved My Man Godfrey (also with Powell). Or maybe it’s because Libeled Lady, even more than some of its fellow screwball classics, is heavily focused on its (very funny) farcical elements. Newspaperman Warren Haggerty (Tracy) enlists his irritated fiancee, Gladys (Jean Harlow), to help reporter Bill Chandler (Powell) trap heiress Connie Allenbury (Loy) in a seeming affair, thereby invalidating Allenbury’s libel suit against Haggerty’s paper. Got all that? As is often the case with screwball, all of the deception and scheming helps some fast-talking, fast-thinking people clarify what it is they actually value about one another. What sets Libeled Lady apart is all four players’ dexterity and flexibility when assessing their relationships – which makes it all the more heedlessly romantic when their various mix-ups settle on the “right” partners. Jesse Hassenger

• Libeled Lady is available to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia

Sanctuary

Hard to pin down, Sanctuary pulls off the astonishing trick of turning an erotic thriller into a romcom, offering a virtually real-time, high-wire all-nighter that peers deeply into the psychology of love and seduction. It stars Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott (shortly before the pair was to feature in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 absurdist coming-of-age flick Poor Things), here playing the roles of Rebecca and Hal, a hard-luck domme and the failson client who is about to dump her. The latter is about to inherit his father’s business empire and needs to clean up his act, but Rebecca has other plans, swiftly turning the tables by threatening to blackmail Hal with recordings of his deepest humiliations. What follows could be called an escalating battle of the sexes, but it could just as well be described as a torrid lovers’ quarrel, a roleplay gone much too far, or even do-it-yourself therapy. What makes Sanctuary stand out is the ever-surprising plot – where virtually anything can and does happen – and how Rebecca and Hal mercilessly peel back the layers of one another’s psyche. Throw in enough sexual tension to kill a horse and two simply astonishing performances, and you have a movie that cerebral, sexy, funny and extremely entertaining. Veronica Esposito

• Sanctuary is available to watch on Hulu in the US, to rent digitally in the UK and Australia

Lonesome

Loneliness strikes even in a crowd of nearly 7 million people – and in this urban romance from the last gasps of the jazz age, two heartsick New Yorkers pine for a lasting connection in a city growing bigger by the day. Mary and Jim (silent comedians Barbara Kent and Glenn Tryon), are hard-pressed moderns, living by the clock, working at the telephone exchange and on the factory line, who meet and fall in love on an Independence Day trip to the beach. Swapping the traffic of the city for the pleasure-rides and fireworks of Coney Island, they share a glimpse of a future – but lovers thrown together by fate are easily parted the same way. This is a wistful kind of romcom, in the great tradition of New York love stories. Lonesome is a lovelorn, restless “city symphony”, which only pauses during the tacked-on talking scenes that the producers erroneously thought would modernise this otherwise silent movie. Only question is: the same city that keeps Mary and Jim apart also conspire them a shot at happiness? Pamela Hutchinson

• Lonesome is available to watch on YouTube and Tubi in the US and Australia and YouTube in the UK

Hav Plenty

Two decades before “it’s complicated” was an official relationship status, Hav Plenty was modeling the behavior with young Black romantics who radiated with 1990s’ grown and sexy vibes. Based on the true story of one man’s crush on Def Jam A&R turned #MeToo advocate Drew Dixon, Christopher Scott Cherot writes, directs and stars as Lee – a frustrated writer whose simmering affections for Hav (Chenoa Maxwell in her biggest role) fire up when he’s invited to a family New Year’s Eve party. Hav juggles Lee’s heart in one hand even as she’s engaged to an R&B star; with the other, she interferes with Lee’s ability to connect her flirty best friend and Hav’s sister divorcee. Indulgent, meandering and talky, Hav Plenty typifies R-rated indie screwballs of this era, and it took Cherot working as a cab driver and his mom taking out a third mortgage on her house to get this love letter made. The story ends on a messy, bittersweet note – just as real life tends to. Andrew Lawrence

• Hav Plenty is available on Amazon Prime Video

An Autumn’s Tale

An Autumn’s Tale is a delightful odd duck: a Cantonese romcom set in New York, made on a shoestring budget but starring two of Hong Kong’s biggest stars, that for a long time was difficult to see despite its cult fandom. In recent years some British and Australian distributors have done everyone a favor by putting it on Blu-ray and giving new audiences a chance to experience its charm. Our lonely heroine is Jennifer (Cherie Chung), a reserved, middle-class Hongkonger who comes to New York for college and soon suffers homesickness, money problems and romantic disappointment. A streetwise distant cousin, Figgy (Chow Yun-fat, more commonly an action star), agrees to help her around. Can the scrappy, uncultured Figgy help Jennifer find her way – and perhaps find something more? Of course. Yet this movie, for its cliches and predictable beats, is full of wit and emotional wisdom. Directed by Mabel Cheung, an underappreciated female film-maker, it also boasts great location shots of the seedy splendor of 1980s New York. J Oliver Conroy

• An Autumn’s Tale is available to watch on the Criterion Channel in the US and to rent digitally in the UK

Tkaronto

The first question we hear in Tkaronto (the Mohawk name for Toronto), is: “Who are you and I?” It lingers throughout Métis film-maker Shane Belcourt’s modest and melancholic romance about two people feeling alienated from their own Indigenousness and finding a fleeting sense of place with each other. Made for a scrappy $25,000, at a time when Indigenous creators were tokenized by an industry that barely supported their storytelling, Belcourt’s Before Sunrise-inspired debut feature resonates far beyond its means. Duane Murray’s white-passing Métis creative Ray (a surrogate for Belcourt) and Melanie McLaren’s Anishinaabe painter Jolene cross paths, just as they’re both interrogating what it means to be urban-dwelling Indigenous people at a distance – not just from the reserves, but also the culture and history that had been taken from them. Tkaronto patiently and beautifully expresses that longing for connection through their fleeting, thorny and bittersweet romantic interlude, in which two awkwardly charming individuals find a mirror in each other and fall in love with the person they see reflected back at them. Radheyan Simonpillai

• Tkaronto is available to watch on Vimeo on Demand

My Old Ass

My Old Ass, writer-director Megan Park’s criminally underseen albeit woefully titled sophomore feature, is an unlikely romance film. The film’s central relationship is between 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella), a recent high school graduate in her last summer at home, and her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), whom she conjures during a magic mushrooms trip. Though older Elliott’s vague advice is to avoid anyone named Chad – and she soon meets a very nice Chad (Percy Hynes White) – her primary concern is the looming drumbeat of time. The film’s standout scene is a hallucinatory tribute to Baby-era Justin Bieber. There’s a late-stage, tear-jerking twist. None of this should work – Stella and Plaza look nothing alike, for one – and yet few films have sneaked past my defenses and suffused me with romantic notions quite like this one. That’s both in the broad view – swelling tides of love for family, for youth, for home – and in the narrower sense: sometimes, despite your best intentions or expectations (or beliefs of your own sexuality), you fall in love with someone anyway, even someone named Chad – and even knowing what you know now, you’d do it all again. Adrian Horton

• My Old Ass is available on Amazon Prime Video

Addicted to Love

Back in 1997, Meg Ryan, who had spent almost a decade as reigning romcom sweetheart, decided to pull a Cable Guy. Like Jim Carrey, who had found success with big, for-the-family humour before dipping into darkness, she decided to subvert her star image and go rogue in the sour, ex-stalking comedy Addicted to Love. But Ryan found, like Carrey before her, that audiences and critics were not willing to follow and the film was dismissed as a “disturbing” misstep. Yet in my teens, it was always an undersung VHS favourite because like the very best movie romances, it understands that it’s our shared perversities that truly bond us. In this case it’s Ryan and Matthew Broderick’s bitter dumpees joining forces to spy on and eventually destroy their exes who have shacked up together (it means we’re watching a romcom of people watching and eventually rewriting a romcom). He is led by heartache and she by rage but the deeper they get into their increasingly deranged – and dangerous – scheme, the more they realise that doing terrible things with each other is maybe the most fun they’ve ever had. The most alienating romcoms fail to understand or really admit that true romance can turn us into petty and pathetic lunatics. Addicted to Love knows us far better than that. Benjamin Lee

• Addicted to Love is available to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia