On-Screen Romance: Best Valentine's Day Movies

By Broadside Writer Ross Bonaime

10. Brokeback Mountain:
This film has become pigeon-holed as “that gay cowboy film.” But at its core, the story is simply about unattainable love and how love can appear in the most unlikely of places.

9. Garden State:
Zack Braff’s 2004 writing and directing debut takes Braff’s character home for his mother’s funeral, but he stays for the quirky Sam, played by Natalie Portman. Sam not only teaches him about the lighter side of life, The Shins and unusual yet happy families, but about what he has been missing most in his life.

Read more to see what movie made number one!

8. Sunrise:
The first Academy Award winner for Best Picture has an adulterous husband whose lover from the big city convinces him to murder his wife. Changing his mind at the last minute, he takes his wife out for a day on the town and realizes what he almost lost.

7. The 40-Year-Old Virgin:
Steve Carrell’s breakthrough role showed that in a relationship, there are more important things than sex and that a film can be both equally raunchy and romantic.

6. It Happened One Night:
Clark Gable plays a journalist who decides to help a recently married heiress, played by Claudette Colbert, return to her new husband to get a divorce in exchange for an exclusive story. But, while the two are stuck together and must work side by side, they start to see something in each other.

5. WALL-E:
Pixar’s story from 700 years in the future of the last robot on earth who is left to clean it up is a lonely and touching story of finding love for the first time and doing anything to keep it. The love story between the archaic little guy and the technologically superior EVE, is one of the most simple, yet complex and beautiful love stories in recent years. And it’s between robots.

4. The Shop Around the Corner:
James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan play two employees at a shop who can’t stand each other. However, they both believe that they may have found the loves of their lives in their unknown pen pals. What they do not know is that they are writing to each other and are falling in love fast.

3. Before Sunrise/Before Sunset:
Jesse and Celine are two travelers who randomly meet while on a train and decide to spend the day together in Vienna, both knowing that by the end of the day, they will have to say goodbye forever. The sequel, which takes place nine years later, has them running into each other once again in France, and asking why they didn’t make it work, what they may have lost and if they could still make it work.

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
Director Michel Gondry is known for his mind-bending films, but ESOTSM is also heart wrenching. The story of a couple going through a procedure to forget the memories of their past lover asks the question, is it better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all?

1. City Lights:
In this 1931 classic, Charlie Chaplin’s iconic character of The Tramp falls in love with a poor, blind girl. Unfortunately, the girl is misled to believe that The Tramp is rich, therefore leaving him to attempt to seem as such. When The Tramp finds out about a procedure that could restore her eyesight, he goes out to find the money. When she can finally see, he worries that she will not love him knowing that he is not rich, but in fact poor. However, City Lights shows that love is truly blind when she sees him and right away knows that this is the man who she has fallen in love with.