15 Best Romance Movies Of All Time, Ranked

Is there any other genre as alchemically enmeshed with the very nature of cinema as romance films? With all due respect to all the great movies that set out to make us laugh, scare us witless, rile us up with action, or torture us with suspense, there's just something about the raw purity of storytelling predicated on the ups and downs of love — some radical, elemental centering of relationships as the core of the medium — that seems to bring out the best in filmmakers and actors.

On this list, you will find a ranking of some of the best romance movies of all time, with "romance movies" being defined as those in which the romance is a central and primary driving force, whether whimsical or tragic, realistic or idealized, crowd-pleasing or brashly experimental. To help narrow it down, we've not included any romantic comedies in this ranking except for one where, while funny, puts more emphasis on the romance and drama than most that would otherwise deserve to be on this list. Here's hoping you find plenty here to fall in love with our list of the best romance movies of all time.

It's stunning enough that "Michael" — an open, unrestrained gay romance flick made in 1924 — exists at all. And it's all the more stunning that, thanks to the sheer genius and career-high emotional openness of Carl Theodor Dreyer behind the camera, it manages to be one of the most sensitive, mature, and affecting romance films ever made.

At once painfully tragic and deeply generous in its storytelling, "Michael" centers on Claude Zoret (Benjamin Christensen), celebrated painter and hopeless romantic, and Michael (Walter Slezak), the model who becomes his muse and lover. After an initial period of blissfulness, their relationship is complicated by the arrival of Countess Lucia Zamikow (Nora Gregor), leading to bitterness, betrayal, and despair, before a late-breaking twist brings unexpected warmth back into the picture.

For all the heavy emotions the film juggles, Dreyer depicts the characters and their swirling feelings with such clarity, nonjudgmental compassion, and unfaltering visual acumen that the movie transcends whatever limitations its era might impose, and emerges as an ageless treatise on the pain of loneliness and the power of love to overcome it. A century later, it's still swoon-worthy.

The genius of "Before Sunrise," the 1995 film with which Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke kickstarted one of the greatest cinematic romances, is that it cuts out all the noise. Perched upon decades of love stories set over weeks or months or years, it asks: If falling in love is the process by which two people snap into a magical and fleeting existential harmony, then why not just focus entirely on that process and let everything else fall away? Why not have the film's own structure mirror the miraculous elation of a perfect first date?

Such is the animus of "Before Sunrise," in which Jesse (Hawke) and Céline (Delpy) meet by chance on a train from Budapest, decide to hang out for the day, and then keep making excuses to spend a little longer together, and a little longer, and a little longer. The film, as directed by Linklater and scripted by him alongside Kim Krizan, is like fine pastry, as soft and frail to the touch as it is bold and sophisticated in construction. No other movie in the world so successfully bowls you over with the incomparable special effect of watching two people be enchanted by each other in real time.

Written by Sooni Taraporevala and directed by Mira Nair, 1991's "Mississippi Masala" is an ideal grown-up romantic drama, in which love is as complex and demanding to sustain as it is ultimately simple and rewarding. Mina (Sarita Choudhury) is an Ugandan-born Indian American whose family was forced to relocate to rural Mississippi in 1972 by Idi Amin's rule. There she falls in love with Black carpet cleaner Demetrius (Denzel Washington, in one of his very best movies), and the two set out to make things work even while facing mutual disapproval from their respective families.

In addition to tackling the subject of American interracial romance with a level of depth, intelligence, and sensitivity few other movies have approached, "Mississippi Masala" goes through every step of Mina and Demetrius' budding relationship with a patience and a sense of weathered wisdom that makes most Hollywood romance look positively childish by comparison. It's all real, honest, authentic, politically steeped, and deeply-felt — which doesn't subtract at all from how utterly ravishing the movie is as a vicarious love story. The chemistry between Choudhury and Washington alone is the stuff that cinema is made of.

Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" is among the most sweepingly romantic films of all time, animated or otherwise, family-friendly or otherwise. Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, with music by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, it lines up several Walt Disney Animation canon highs — best screenplay, best character designs, best original song pack, most expressive cel animation — into a movie of generational panache that changed animated feature films forever. But the reason it all works so incredibly well is that every bit of craftsmanship is placed in service of a steadfast faith in love as a driving force.

The fraught, gradual, step-by-step connection between Belle (Paige O'Hara) and the Beast (Robby Benson) is sometimes cast as an instance of "Stockholm syndrome," but that assessment misses both the Gothic extremity and the fairy tale dreaminess at work in their story. The crux of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" is the question of whether love (and with it tenderness, respect, vulnerability, communication) can bloom from under the rockiest, most tragic terrain. And it does, with every note of Menken's score getting you to believe in the magic a little more.

In the pantheon of great tragic love stories, there remain few films as implacably potent as "Brokeback Mountain" — the film in which Ang Lee took the deep, versatile skillset he honed over years of alt-pop filmmaking in both Hollywood and Taiwan, and applied it to an accessible, crowd-pleasing exercise in complete emotional annihilation.

Starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys who initiate an intense romantic and sexual relationship while working as sheep herders at a remote Wyoming ranch and then spend years circling each other in passionate yet dysfunctional ways, it's a film with a reputation that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of its own historical weight. Yes, it was the film that introduced large swaths of the mainstream public to the idea of unbridled, fully-honored gay romance, and Lee portrays Ennis and Jack's love with a mix of delicacy and candid eroticism that makes as irresistibly persuasive now as it was in 2005. But "Brokeback Mountain" is far from just a representation win. Even in an ideal world where homophobia didn't exist anymore, it would still be an unforgettable feat of devastating romantic drama attuned to quiet human textures.

One of the many radically original films in the filmography of Malaysian-Taiwanese maverick Tsai Ming-liang, who makes slow cinema to quicken the heart, 1998's "The Hole" is a film that reimagines romantic cinema as a vehicle for pure poetic expression.

In Tsai's films, the environment, the weather, and the imagery often do the work of revealing the characters' interiority more than the dialogue or the plot, and in "The Hole," that bold style reaches its apex. Set entirely in a dilapidated apartment building during a bizarre epidemic that causes people to behave like insects before unceremoniously dying, the movie follows a man (Lee Kang-sheng) and a woman (Yang Kuei-mei) who live in apartments right above and below each other, yet initially have no relationship at all.

After a plumber drills a hole on the man's floor that breaks through the woman's ceiling, their lives begin to intersect in eerie ways. Tsai uses his mastery of mood and oblique visual storytelling to chart, largely through dialogue-free scenes and surreal musical numbers, the development of an intense romantic connection between those two near-strangers trapped together in the same urban decay. It's bracingly, exquisitely romantic stuff, delivered through entirely unconventional means.

Pretty much every massively sad romance film made from the '50s onward owes something to "Floating Clouds," the masterpiece of Japan's great Mikio Naruse, notable as one of Akira Kurosawa's favorite films of all time.

This 1955 film follows years in the life of a typist (Hideko Takamine), who falls for a married forester (Masayuki Mori) during World War II and then initiates a messy years-long affair with him. Naruse observes the doomed love of two lost souls both incisively and matter-of-factly — letting emotional wreckage build slowly and surely, until it's so overwhelming that you find yourself at a loss, wondering how exactly it was that we could possibly have gotten here.

Bustling with life and movement like most Naruse films, yet drenched in the stagnant and deadening ironies of Japan's postwar gloom, it's a movie that doesn't skimp on the splendor of love — yet understands finitude and fallibility are always lurking, ready to be brought to bear by the march of the years. Every years-later smash cut feels borderline emotionally violent.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes movies like nobody else, and although several of his films could be said to be focused on love stories, 2004's "Tropical Malady" is the film in which it's really possible to see what a romance by way of Apichatpong looks like. Unsurprisingly, one of the defining filmmakers of the 21st century made one of the defining romance films of the 21st century — and of all cinema history, really.

Divided into two halves, "Tropical Malady" uses its unconventional, elliptical structure to take the measure of love first as a sociocultural and erotic phenomenon, and then as a force of nature. Initially, we're introduced to Kang (Banlop Lomnoi) and Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), a soldier and a factory worker who meet at a small village in Thailand and embark on a brief yet soul-stirring dalliance. This segment alone is dazzling, as Apichatpong fuses soft intimacy and raw, almost atavistic desire so naturally that you barely notice he's essentially reinventing the genre. Then, at the halfway mark, "Tropical Malady" morphs into a mythological story about a soldier (Lomnoi again) chasing a tiger spirit (Kaewbuadee again) through the forest, and the film's themes and feelings expand into a dizzying, hypnotic swirl.

One of the most popular and influential American films of the 2000s, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is still the reference point for boundary-breaking romantic cinema in the hearts of innumerable cinephiles around the world.

Even setting aside its nifty conceptual gimmick — which sees a man (Jim Carrey) travel into his own mind as he undergoes a medical procedure to erase all recollection of his ex-girlfriend (Kate Winslet), only to start fighting against the procedure and clinging to the memories — and the sheer brilliance of that gimmick as a catalyst for formal and structural playfulness, "Eternal Sunshine" is just a stunningly wise and deeply-felt meditation on human connection.

The 2004 film touches on every aspect of being with someone: the scary delight of being seen, the mundane interplay between admiration and annoyance, the mutual shaping of subjectivity, the inexplicable drive to swallow all bitterness and keep trying. Both Carrey's Joel Barish and Winslet's Clementine Kruczynski, as rendered through Charlie Kaufman's blisteringly smart screenplay and Michel Gondry's endlessly imaginative direction, are such fully-realized humans that their story becomes an epic of intimacy, at once hauntingly relatable and entrancingly specific.

A pioneering effort in the history of Cameroonian cinema, Dikongué-Pipa's "Muna Moto" (sometimes identified by the English title "The Child of Another") is one of the best films ever at laying out the tension between love's simple certainty and the rigid dictates of socially-approved conjugality. David Endene and Arlette Din Bell play Ngando and Ndomé, two lovers in a deeply tender and caring relationship who are kept from marrying by Ngando's poverty, which makes it impossible for him to afford the dowry.

As that premise gets spun out into an exploration of the effects of patriarchy and colonialism in Cameroonian society, the 1975 film becomes a manifesto by implication, celebrating the beauty of young love, music, and community while lamenting the constraints placed on those things by an unfair, power-dictated world. A diligent proponent of an idiosyncratically African cinema, Dikongué-Pipa springs for imagery and formal choices as galvanizingly original as they are deeply thought-out. The result is a romance film where every single frame feels charged with profound personal and political meaning.

A veritable modern classic from the moment of its 2019 release, Céline Sciamma's "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" confines itself almost entirely to a remote island off the Brittany coast, where, in the late 18th century, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) travels to paint a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). A young gentry woman whose arranged Milanese fiancé doesn't yet know what she looks like, Héloïse doesn't want to be married, and keeps refusing to be painted by anyone — until Marianne strikes a connection with her that breaks through her barriers.

A massive contradiction ensues: Héloïse accepts Marianne's gaze because they're falling in love with each other, yet the very act of creating the titular painting is pushing away any future they may have together. What remains is a chance for the two women to make the most of their time alone with each other, and Sciamma fashions that brief, intimate, wistful vacation from the patriarchal world into one of the most breathtakingly beautiful love stories ever told.

Michael Curtiz's "Casablanca" is one of the single most iconic movie classics of all time — a parade of immortal lines, scenes, songs, and characters that feels as wondrous to first experience for oneself as a Shakespeare play. In addition to being a perfect World War II drama that capitalized on real history, "Casablanca" is also a perfect film d'amour, in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman are playing their characters as much as they are embodying totemic archetypes of romance.

Bogart plays Rick Blaine, the dejected American owner of a nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco; Bergman plays Ilsa Lund, a former lover who turns up at Rick's gin joint needing help for herself and her resistance leader husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) to escape the Nazis. In a handful of scenes mostly unfolding within the walls of Rick's Café Américain, the movie makes you believe in a love of oceanic depth and power, as though history itself were being manifested through the nuances of Rick and Ilsa's tremulous chemistry.

There is one film that exists at the tiptop of the entire history of cinema about forbidden love, and it is "Brief Encounter." Directed by David Lean years before his industry apogee as a maker of widescreen Hollywood epics, this 1945 masterpiece takes the simplest of premises and does everything that can possibly be done with it — romantically, cinematically, philosophically.

Adapted from the 1936 play "Still Life" by Noël Coward, "Brief Encounter" follows Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a married woman with a habit of visiting the village of Milford, Surrey to do shopping on a weekly basis. One day, she meets the also married Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a local doctor, at the train station. Through a series of initially inoffensive interactions, the two fall head over heels in love with each other — yet the repressive moral surveillance of 1930s English society bars them from consummating their affair. The way that the film burrows into its characters' passion with scenes of subtle courtship in full public view is nothing short of miraculous; no other movie has ever made love feel so powerful, irresistible, and achingly tragic.

The first American production to be directed by German silent film legend F. W. Murnau, 1927's "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" was in many ways the peak of the cinematic form just prior to the dawn of talkies. Nominally, its story is rather eyebrow-raising: A man (George O'Brien) from a small lakeside town is persuaded by his mistress (Margaret Livingston) to kill his wife (Janet Gaynor) so they can be together; he agrees, but refrains at the last minute; the wife hurriedly escapes on a trolley and the husband goes after her; in the big city, they find themselves drawn together again.

But the plot of "Sunrise" is not to be taken literally. Murnau merely uses its symbolic extremes as a clothesline for an unbridled imagetic exploration of what it means to be in love with someone, the city's overwhelming bustle capturing feelings that untether themselves from storytelling and enter the realm of pure sensory experience. Visually and formally, with its dazzlingly revolutionary compositions and camera movements, it's the blueprint for all romantic cinema that came after.

"In the Mood for Love" is a film that makes you believe cinema is being reborn in front of your eyes. Not just the best romance of the 21st century but one of the very best films of all time, period, it is a torrent of impossibly beautiful and evocative images organized into an emotional story of literary breadth and depth, able to touch on every subject dear to humankind — the weight of decisions, the omnipresence of longing, the frailty of memory, the implacability of time — without once betraying its own deceptive simplicity.

Wong Kar-Wai, working at full throttle as both writer and director, makes a meal of every scene in the saga of Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) and Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), next-door neighbors in a 1962 Hong Kong apartment building who learn that their respective spouses are having an affair. While resolving not to stoop to their level, Su and Chow slip irresistibly into a torrid emotional tryst, carried out in deeply meaningful gestures around the Hong Kong night like the world's most elaborate dance. It's so beautiful, so bittersweet, and so perfect that it's almost too much to take.