​​The 10 Most Romantic Movies of All Time

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, today we’re counting down the very best romantic movies — from beloved meet-cutes that feel as cozy as being wrapped up in a warm blanket to old-fashioned tearjerkers that will shatter your heart into a million pieces.

From the first awkward stirrings of attraction and the giddy thrills of a fleeting encounter to the crushing lows of a missed connection, the following list represents just the tip of the iceberg in more than a century’s worth of swoon-worthy love stories that have charmed audiences and made us sob uncontrollably. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find room for time-honored classics like “The Clock”, “The Apartment”, “Moonstruck”, “The Lady Eve”, “City Lights”, “An Affair to Remember”, “It Happened One Night”, or “Comrades: Almost a Love Story”, while many other tales of forbidden romance (“In the Mood for Love”, “The Age of Innocence”, “Brokeback Mountain”, “All That Heaven Allows”, and “Pride & Prejudice”) could just as easily have found their way on here and obviously deserve your attention as well.

Our lineup below, listed in chronological order, offers a collection of movies that will tug at your heartstrings and are well worth revisiting time and time again.

1. History is Made at Night (1937)

Forget Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in “Titanic” — If you’re looking for the ultimate Hollywood romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of a tragic maritime disaster involving an iceberg, do yourself a favor and add this unsung masterpiece by Frank Borzage to your streaming queue.

In this buried treasure from Hollywood’s golden age ripe for reappraisal and newly restored by Criterion, the always-reliable Jean Arthur is an understated powerhouse as a wealthy American socialite caught in a tangled web of misunderstandings and messy divorce battles and torn between her possessive ex-husband and a sophisticated Parisian head waiter (Charles Boyer).

Sure, “History is Made at Night” may be syrupy enough to give viewers a sugar rush on their first go-round. But dig a little deeper and you’ll see there’s also a bit of something for everyone to enjoy: heartfelt performances, razor-sharp dialogue, Sirkian melodrama, pointed social commentary, screwball hijinks, grand setpieces, and a showstopping finale that puts James Cameron’s $2 billion tentpole to shame. Just make sure to have a box of tissues nearby.

2. Casablanca (1942)

You likely don’t need a reminder that “Casablanca” is a pretty fantastic romantic film. However, after being chewed up incessantly, buried under critical acclaim, and spoofed across all media for 83 years now, it’s easy to forget that during production, nobody involved including director Michael Curtiz realized they were making one of the best tearjerkers of Hollywood’s golden age as well as one of the most enduring Best Picture winners of all time.

We all love to quote lines of the dialogue by heart — “Here’s looking at you, kid”, “We’ll always have Paris,” and “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” have all entered the cultural lexicon at this point. And while its underlying theme of personal sacrifice for the greater good in the face of unfathomable evil obviously continues to strike a chord, what truly keeps us coming back is the irresistible megawatt star pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as Rick and Ilsa — a pair of doomed old flames helplessly swept aside by the tides of history who reconnect behind enemy lines in North Africa during WWII. Fellas, they don’t make ’em like they used to.

3. Brief Encounter (1945)

Swooning romantic yearning builds to a fever pitch in this gorgeously-shot, post-war tale of mismatched lovers concerning two ordinary people — a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) — who earnestly fall head over heels for one-another after meeting at a railway station.

When one thinks of the great David Lean, grand, sweeping period epics with thousands of extras, colossal budgets, and an even bigger runtime instinctively spring to mind — not so much a hushed, 86-minute weepie. But despite scaling things down and working on a considerably smaller canvas than usual, the “Lawrence of Arabia” British director is just as effective and stirs up an ocean of emotions by making every little line of dialogue, gesture, and subtle glance count — though it is the things that are ultimately left unsaid that haunt the viewer the most.

An octogenarian black-and-white stage adaptation that consists almost entirely of quiet, intimate conversations between two grown adults can be a hard sell to watch for Valentine’s Day. But if you’re looking for a title that will tug at your heartstrings and leave you and your special someone in a puddle of tears, “Brief Encounter” is just the ticket.

4. Roman Holiday (1953)

Even by standard rom-com standards, the palpable chemistry between Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck here is as good as it gets and virtually impossible to resist. The A-list Hollywood coupling crack and sizzle together and set the screen aflame in this breezy fairy tale directed by William Wyler about a runaway European princess, Ann, who escapes from her dreary royal duties during a diplomatic visit to Rome only to run into a streetwise American reporter, Joe Bradley.

Part Cinderella story, part Italian travelogue, you simply couldn’t ask for a finer tonic for the soul to whisk you away, lift your spirits, and put you in a good mood when you’re feeling down than watching these two mismatched love birds gleefully riding around on a Vespa scooter through the streets of the Eternal City, doing some sightseeing, touring the Colosseum, and even attending a dance on a boat. The outcome is never truly in question — early on, it’s clear Joe is too smitten with Ann to betray her trust for the sake of getting the big scoop — but the bittersweet ending hits you like a ton of bricks nonetheless.

5. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

At a critical juncture in time when the big-budget musicals Hollywood’s studio system was dishing out grew increasingly bloated and stale, all it took was the most hopelessly romantic director in all of France trying to get his honest-to-goodness homage to old MGM musicals off the ground to jolt new life into the genre and steer it back on course.

“My Fair Lady” may have taken home the Oscar, but of all 1964 musicals, time has been most kind to this one by Jacques Demy, a candy-colored and immaculately staged emotional rollercoaster that recounts the on-again, off-again relationship between bright-eyed teen shopgirl Geneviève (a radiant Catherine Deneuve in a star-making turn) and a local garage mechanic called Guy (Nino Castelnuovo).

The sparks fly but, alas, fate had other plans. Before long, Guy is unexpectedly called up for military service in the Algerian War, leaving the newly pregnant Geneviève in complete disarray. With no other choice, she gives in to his mother’s demands and ends up settling for a Parisian upper-class suitor instead. The musical numbers and dazzling choreography will take your breath away, and if watching these star-crossed lovers reunite years later at a desolate gas station doesn’t make you well up inside, you must have a heart of steel.