I decided to make this a genre since many romances were serious but just as many good ones are comedies, and because some comedies have no romance at all, plus it's a long list of really great films
(updated: 3/12/10; * = new additions)
- A Room With a View
- Adam's Rib (bw)
- Alice
- Annie Hall (4 Oscars/5 noms.)
- As Good As It Gets (2 Oscars/7 noms.)
- Beautiful Girls
- Big
- Blast From the Past
- Breaking Away
- Cinema Paradiso
- Clueless *
- Defending Your Life
- Enemies, A Love Story
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Goodbye, Lenin! (Germany)*
- The Graduate
- Groundhog Day
- Hannah and Her Sisters (3 Oscars/7 noms.)
- Heaven Can Wait
- L.A. Story
- Lost in Translation
- Love Among the Ruins
- Manhattan
- Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment
- Much Ado About Nothing
- The Philadelphia Story (bw)
- Shakespeare in Love (7 Oscars and 13 nominations, surprisingly, director John Madden did not win, losing to Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan)
- Sideways
- Tootsie
- There's Something About Mary
- Wall-E *
- When Harry Met Sally
Runners-Up: 50 First Dates, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Bridget Jones' Diary, Emma, Finding Nemo, The Gay Divorcee (bw), A Life Less Ordinary, The Paper Chase.
Many of these were nominated for
Best Picture, which seldom goes to a comedy so the odds were stacked against them: A Room With a View, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Breaking Away, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Graduate, Hannah and Her Sisters, Lost in Translation, Sideways, Tootsie.
Cinema Paradiso won over a dozen international awards, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Love Among the Ruins won several Emmys, and starred Katherine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier as two people who meet again in court decades after having a brief affair.
Much Ado About Nothing, by Kenneth Branagh, is my favorite Shakespearean play put on film; the cast works even with Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves in it! Branagh believes you don't need a British accent for Shakespearean acting - what a striking concept.
Woody Allen in his prime excelled at this type of film: Alice, Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo. Since that era and his self-absorbed Bergman-esque period, my favorite of his was the recent
Match Point, a crime-romance with Scarlet Johanssen.
Dir: Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats, 2001, France (10*) Perhaps the best feature length documentary film, seven years in the making
The terrific Australian film Walkabout was the first dvd I ordered, and is just as much a romance film as anything else. When you watch it, write down the poem from end of the film.
Doc of course refers to documentaries.
