Lasso the Moon: A Cinephile's Top Ten Love Movie List

Yes, yes. Valentines shmalentines. But I've given in.

According to bestlovemovies.com (a good url for those aiming to climb the old google rankings), the best six are, in order: Titanic, The Notebook, Pearl Harbor, 50 First Dates, Pretty Woman and Twilight.

Need I even comment? Need I even cry, or possibly wretch, all over my computer screen? And I even enjoyed a couple of those titles. But The Notebook? Pearl Harbor? Why must love stories inspire such cheese? Now, to be fair, you can find a solid, if predictably rather dated love movie list according to the folks at AFI. The top ten in their long list of love movies don't, however, include a flick more recent than 1973. Yikes!

Thus my hopefully up-to-date but not cheese-ball list. Cause a great love story need not be a piece of crap movie. 

Note: these aren't necessarily comedies (in fact only three are), they certainly don't all have Cinderella endings and one of them is even usually described as a baseball movie (albeit one of the two best baseball movies ever).

Happy Hallmark Greeting Card holiday.

My Top Ten Picks for Best Love Movie

1. It's a Wonderful Life
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. In the Mood for Love
4. Never Let Me Go
5. High Fidelity
6. Breakfast at Tiffany's
7. Bull Durham
8. Casablanca
9. Sliding Doors
10. When Harry Met Sally

Wistful Thinking: Mark Romanek's "Never Let Me Go"

"That rare find, a fragile little four-leaf clover of a movie that's emotionally devastating, yet all too easily trampled by cynics. " - Peter Debruge, Variety.

Never Let Me Go is a tone poem.

If I were a  painter I'd paint you grey English skies over cold English seas to give you a sense of the beauty of this movie.

If I could play music it would be the piano, slow, tinkling delicate sadness so you could know how this movie effected me. Better yet I'd be a symphony, a famous one, Dvorak's "New World," his ninth symphony, but then only the most heart-shuddering moments from the second movement.

If my favourite books really do break my heart as they heal my soul, or vice versa, it goes that way for movies too. I can't explain it. I'm glad I can't. But this movie has a bit of what Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood has, or what so many great Beatles ballads had (speaking of).Fragility is the perfect word, and probably so much of what made John Lennon's voice so beautiful.

If I'd read Kazuo Ishiguro's book that the movie was based on first, this post might have been quite different. I'm glad I didn't, so I could instead luxuriate in the sense-based wonder that took this compelling story from page to screen and did it with three wonderful performances.

If Carey Mulligan was a revelation in An Education, she is just plain brilliant in this.

If Andrew Garfield stars in this movie as well as The Social Network and has already been cast as Peter Parker in the next Spiderman movie, it's for good reason.

If I couldn't have cared less about Keira Knightley after she kept making pirate movies ... well, all that's changed now.

If I hadn't had to wait to leave the theatre, embarrassed that I'd cried and needed to clean up as I did, maybe I wouldn't be recommending this movie.

Never Let Me Go is a tone poem.

And if that kind of elegiac beauty speaks to you I say go.