love story movie review and rating

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Mega-hit of the 1970s isn't as powerful today.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Although Jennifer supports Oliver in law school, s

A love scene.

Jennifer's dialogue is peppered with mild expl

Parents need to know that some of the dialogue is peppered with mild expletives. Although Jennifer supports Oliver in law school, she promptly gives up her musical aspirations to be a housewife as soon as he finds a job.

Positive Messages

Although Jennifer supports Oliver in law school, she promptly gives up her musical aspirations to be a housewife as soon as he finds a job. Modern audiences may find the gender roles out of sync with the times.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Jennifer's dialogue is peppered with mild expletives.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that some of the dialogue is peppered with mild expletives. Although Jennifer supports Oliver in law school, she promptly gives up her musical aspirations to be a housewife as soon as he finds a job. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 2 parent reviews

A bit of an empty love story...

What's the story.

Radcliffe music major Jennifer Cavilleri (Ali McGraw) and Harvard man Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O'Neal) fall in love despite the differences in their backgrounds. Oliver is from an affluent WASP family while Jennifer grew up in her father's bakery in Rhode Island. Oliver is destined for Harvard Law School, while Jennifer's planning to study piano in Paris, but all of that changes when they announce their engagement. Unwilling to give in to his father's demand that they postpone their marriage, Oliver is cut off without a penny. Jennifer gives up music and takes a job as a teacher to support him while he's in law school. Her investment pays off when he graduates with honors and finds a well-paying job in New York. When Jennifer tries unsuccessfully to get pregnant, she's discovered to be terminally ill. She and Oliver spend their last days savoring every moment together.

Is It Any Good?

Although this corny reworking of Romeo and Juliet is almost saved by Ryan O'Neal's quietly smoldering charm, young viewers may be quick to hit the eject button. Jennifer's constant putdowns and continual sarcasm are so irritating that they undermine the plausibility of Oliver's love for her. Jennifer's illness and death is designed to evoke strong emotions, but viewers who can't get past her abrasive personality may have trouble summoning sympathy. However, sensitive teens may share in Oliver's intense feelings of loss and sadness.

Released in 1970, LOVE STORY was adapted from Erich Segal's best-selling novel and was equally popular onscreen. But the highly romanticized handling of Jennifer's death makes it unlikely to appeal to viewers today. Instead, audiences may cringe when they hear the famous line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." These words were ubiquitous when this tearjerker was released, but their message hasn't aged particularly well.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how death and dying are portrayed in films. Was Jennifer's death portrayed realistically? Families who have experienced the dying and death of family member might compare that to the movie. Why do movie makers make death and dying either seem idyllic, as in this case, or gruesome, as in horror movies? Would you like to see movies that portray death realistically? Why or why not?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 16, 1970
• On DVD or streaming : April 24, 2001
• Cast : Ali MacGraw , Ryan O'Neal , Ray Milland
• Director : Arthur Hiller
• Studio : Paramount Pictures
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : Book Characters
• Run time : 100 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : language and a love scene
• Last updated : March 5, 2023

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Romeo and Juliet

West Side Story

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Love stories: classic romance tales, related topics.

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Love Story (1970)

• User Reviews
• Jenny and Oliver wonderful kissing scene... From this point on, both were entirely engrossed with each other, ready to risk anything for love...
• Oliver's long day search looking for Jenny, until he sees her sitting, outside, on a stair... She forgot her keys... Jenny is comforted by Oliver who tries to apologize for his continual disputes... Jenny, all shaken, and with tears in her eyes and with an emotional voice stops him with words of deep affection: "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
• Oliver, sitting alone and lost to the world, uncertain and perplexed, unable to understand Jenny's tragic fate... If Jenny could spend an hour in his mind, a minute in his heart, a second in his soul to discover what he really feels loving her... Why Jenny has to die so young? Why destiny is against us sometimes, smashing all our hopes and happiness? Why we feel so impotent in front of the will of God? Why can't we understand that we are 'blessed with Life,' and this is our great gift, our true treasure! Barrett's millions could never save Jenny!

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Love Story Ending Explained: What Love Really Means

When people think of open-air ice skating in New York City, well, they probably conjure up the festive Christmas-y confines of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Unless they're old. Baby Boomer old. For members of the generation that protested the Vietnam War before turning into conservative zombies who treat Fox News as an informational IV drip, there is first and foremost the image of the late Ryan O'Neal's Oliver Barrett IV gazing forlornly at the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park as Francis Lai's brilliantly overwrought main theme jerks tears from our ducts with a vicious intensity worthy of Pinhead.

Most Boomers won't get that reference. And for those born as early as the Reagan era who are generally incurious about movies, you probably haven't watched Arthur Hiller's "Love Story." It is a film of its time, but, oh, what a film it was, at least commercially. Based on Erich Segal's bestselling weeper of a novel about a rich boy-poor girl romance that ends tragically, the movie was a New Hollywood anomaly that can charitably be compared to a ruthlessly sentimental mugging like King Vidor's "Stella Dallas." Greenlit by hedonistic executive Robert Evans at the moment he was saving Paramount Pictures from financial ruin, it stood out from the heightened style of genre flicks like Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" or Peter Yates' "Bullitt" by being unabashedly what it was meant to be.

There's no subversion at work when a grief-stricken Oliver leaves the hospital room of a freshly expired Jenny Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw), verbally accosts his status-obsessed father (Ray Milland) and strides purposely to the rink where his wife once watched him skate. It's a skull-shattering cudgel of a finale, and it was effective enough to make "Love Story" the top grossing movie of 1970. Would you like to know more? There's precious little meat on this bone, but here goes nothing!

What you need to remember about the plot of Love Story

Oliver is the bright, beautiful heir of an old-money East Coast family. He attends Harvard College and is a standout player for the school's hockey team. He becomes smitten with Jenny (Ali MacGraw), the daughter of a blue-collar baker (John Marley). He's destined for Harvard law school, while she is eager to put her Radcliffe College classical music degree to use as a teacher. Oliver is a glowing exemplar of New England privilege, but he's sensitive. He leads with his heart, which infuriates his parents who want him to marry into more money. When Oliver announces he intends to wed Jenny, his family cuts him off financially.

Look, the movie works. We're as smitten with these kids as they are with each other, and as we watch them struggle to make ends meet, we really want to do bad things to Ray Milland. Amazingly, they pull through, with Oliver landing a high-paying gig at a corporate law firm in New York City. Alas, just when it appears they've weathered the worst, despite Oliver's family's cruelly punitive efforts, Jenny is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The rest of the film is a predetermined wallow, but O'Neal and MacGraw play their sad-sack parts with emotive zeal. Our abhorrence of Milland goes nuclear when he unwittingly agrees to pay for Jenny's cancer treatment because Oliver lies to him about having knocked up another woman (something the patriarch clearly did during his backsliding days), but we know this is going south because Oliver's kiss-off line to his father is the poster's freaking tagline.

What happened at the end of Love Story

Jenny absolves Oliver of any guilt he might feel about contributing to their predicament before she dies. He meant more to her than her love of music (which diminishes her tremendously as a character, but, hey, we're here for Oliver's heartbreak, not her misfortune). Milland has a change of heart once he learns of Jenny's illness, and rushes (too late) to her bedside. Oliver confronts his father outside of the hospital. When Milland tells him he's sorry, the furious Oliver unleashes a full-scale nuclear strike of despondence at his pops, (which happens to be a passed-along piece of wisdom from Jenny).

"Love? Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Cue Francis Lai and the audience's waterworks .

What the end of Love Story means

Love means never having to say you're sorry? You sure about that?

It's a terrific quip, and it sure beats the hell out of Ray Milland (he hadn't been this distraught since hallucinating a bat killing a mouse on the business end of a long drunk in Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend"), but this sentiment goes sour when you mull it over for all of a nanosecond. Let's say you get into a heated argument, and you call your spouse's mother "a great big poopyhead." Let's take this a step further and say the matriarch in question is not "a great big poopyhead," but is, in fact, a loving woman who just happens to care for her daughter's future, and she's just a tad miffed that you've been squandering the kids' college fund at an off-track betting establishment (without doing the bare minimum of research on owners, breeders and jockeys, which any degenerate gambler will tell you is just throwing your money away).

I believe an apology is warranted at this point in time. Furthermore, I think Milland, within a minute of his son storming his way down 5th Avenue, came to his senses and decided Oliver's utterance was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard in his life (while still feeling not altogether great about Jenny having kicked the bucket).

What the cast and crew of Love Story said about the ending

Ali MacGraw is loudly on record as disapproving of the film's valedictory. As she told Town & Country in 2016 :

"That moment absolutely shows that I didn't know anything about acting; any more seasoned actress would have said, 'What? This is rubbish.' But there I was, crying away in Boston. I think it's the opposite. If you've done something frightful to someone you love, you don't just say you're sorry; you change your behavior."

For his part, O'Neal didn't get the line upon speaking it, and as late as 2021 , wasn't entirely sure what it meant. "Neither of us knew at the time. But over the years, we have come up with answers that ... I don't know. I had to say 'I'm sorry' a lot in my life, that's all I know!"

What the end of Love Story meant for the franchise

You can't have a meaningful discussion about ill-advised sequels without bringing up 1978's "Oliver's Story." Based on the equally ill-advised novel by Erich Segal, the film opens with Oliver hanging out at Jenny's burial , waiting bitterly for her coffin to be lowered into the earth. Francis Lai's theme kicks up once more, and the moviegoers that bothered to show up for this late-breaking sequel (there weren't many of them judging from the film's poor box-office performance) presumably broke into tears.

The rest of the 91-minute movie is a clinic in disastrous narrative decisions. Oliver mopes until he falls in love with the vapid heiress (a shame-faced Candice Bergen) of the Bonwit Teller department store fortune. The entire movie is about Oliver making peace with being a child of privilege, and learning to kind of love it. At this point, the "Love Story" franchise was as dead as Jenny, and no one was sorry about it.

Love Story (1970): A Timeless Tale of Love and Loss

• December 9, 2023

Love Story is a 1970 American romantic drama film directed by Arthur Hiller and starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. It tells the story of Oliver Barrett IV, a wealthy Harvard University student, and Jenny Cavilleri, a working-class Radcliffe College student, who fall deeply in love despite their contrasting backgrounds.

Oliver, heir to a prominent family fortune, is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and attend law school. He plays hockey for the university team and leads a privileged life. Jenny, on the other hand, comes from a modest background and works several part-time jobs to support herself while pursuing her passion for music.

Their paths cross at a Harvard-Radcliffe ice hockey game, and they are immediately drawn to each other. Despite their differences, they fall madly in love and defy societal expectations by getting married. Oliver’s disapproving father disinherits him, forcing the young couple to start their new life together on their own.

Through witty banter, shared dreams, and unwavering support for each other, Oliver and Jenny create a world of their own. They rent a small apartment in New York City, where Oliver lands a job at a law firm. Their love seems to conquer all, but their happiness is tragically short-lived.

Jenny is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and their once bright future takes a devastating turn. Oliver dedicates himself to caring for Jenny, cherishing every remaining moment they have together. Faced with mortality and the inevitable, their love shines even brighter, reminding the audience of its strength and resilience.

Love Story is not just a love story; it is a poignant and heartbreaking tale of loss and the enduring power of love. The film’s emotional impact is further amplified by Francis Lai’s unforgettable score, which includes the iconic song “Love Story,” a timeless ballad that perfectly captures the essence of the film.

The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $100 million at the box office and becoming the highest-grossing film of 1970. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor and Actress for O’Neal and MacGraw.

Love Story remains a beloved classic, capturing the hearts of audiences for generations. It reminds us to cherish every moment, to embrace love in all its forms, and to find beauty even in the face of tragedy.

Here are some of the key themes explored in the film:

• Love conquers all: Despite their social and economic differences, Oliver and Jenny’s love proves to be unyielding and enduring. • The importance of family and support:  While Oliver’s family rejects him, Jenny’s love and support provide him with strength and resilience. • Facing mortality:  The film tackles the difficult subject of terminal illness and the impact it has on individuals and their loved ones. • Living life to the fullest:  Despite knowing her time is limited, Jenny embraces life with courage and joy, inspiring others to do the same. • The power of memory and love:  Even after Jenny’s passing, Oliver finds solace in the memories they shared and the love that continues to bind them together.

by Gary Arnold The Washington Post , 1970

When it comes to a movie like Love Story, criticism and immunology necessarily overlap. It was quite apparent from the clearing of throats and muffling of sobs and blowing of noses going on at the preview showing that if one resists Love Story, one probably resists it in vain. Many people—perhaps a clear majority of the human race—are not just willing to be sapped by this sappy mate­rial; they’re also willing to grab the emotional blackjack out of the hands of writer Erich Segal, director Arthur Hiller, composer Fran­cis Lai and friends and happily sap themselves. Indeed, I’m not sure the material would work unless people were predisposed to swallow it whole and helped wash it down with lots of self-pity.

For the record, one notes that Love Story has been grossly successful in print both here and abroad and that the film version should be more grossly successful yet. Curiously, the story began as a movie scenario and was then recast as a wafer-thin, best-selling novel. This genesis may cause problems of categorization for the Motion Picture Academy, unless screenwriters have enough self-respect to decline blessing the script with an Oscar nomination at all.

Once one has conceded Love Story its popularity and profits, however, the diagnosis is gloomy. I found this one of the most thoroughly resistible sentimental movies I’d ever seen. And I mean resistible on commonplace grounds. There is scarcely a character or situation or line in the story that rings true, that suggests real sim­plicity or generosity of feeling, a sentiment or emotion honestly experienced and expressed. Moreover, the film simply compares poorly with countless decently or indecently sentimental movies one recalls with affection.

Having been susceptible to Camille or Dark Victory or Jezebel or Goodbye, Mr. Chips or Lassie Come Home or The Rainmaker or Tiger Bay or Breakfast at Tiffany’s and heaven knows what else doesn’t necessarily make one ready for Love Story. In fact, really vivid memories may be a hindrance, since they’d illustrate how elementary Segal & Co. are at the tearjerker game, how dependent they are upon our capacity for self-hypnosis.

What this means, of course, is that in rejecting Love Story one is essentially rejecting the side of people that makes them fall for it, or even want to fall for it. But, under the circumstances, what else can one do? This material tries to establish a very unhealthy relationship with our most morbid apprehensions and regrets, then flat­ters us for feeling susceptible. It’s a smug tearjerker, worth resisting on principle, because it’s been so deliberately designed as a mass-cultural bromide, a reactionary bridge over all the troubled political and artistic waters of the last few years, leading backward and go­ing nowhere.

There is Dick Shawn on the Tonight Show , subbing for Johnny Carson and congratulating Erich Segal on the success of his pint-sized powerhouse of a scenario-novella. Shawn remarks how re­freshing he found the book to be and hopes, like thousands of others, no doubt, that it’s a great trend-turner and trend-setter, the sort of entertainment we’ll all be “getting back to.” Segal accepts the accolades humbly but declines to make any far-reaching specu­lations about the drift of American morals and letters.

The situation would be laughable if it didn’t have such perni­cious implications. The book was, of course, widely promoted as an antidote to the “sort of thing” that “went too far,” particularly Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Even if one were prepared to disapprove of Roth, the maudlin thing Segal is getting back to has never been a vital or wholesome part of American literature. Love Story is economy-sized Fannie Ilurst written in economy-sized Er­nest Ilcmingwaycse. Ironically, college romance is a Roth spe­cialty, and his accounts of it—in both Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy —expose the shallowness of Segal’s material.

Or.e can imagine a new Rip Van Winkle, asleep for the past generation, waking and entering a theater playing Love Story. Ex­cept for details—clothes, hairstyles, the fact that Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker didn’t quite look like themselves and that Rav Milland had somehow gone old and bald—he would probably feel right at home.

Segal himself must have mixed feelings about getting away with this smarmy, anachronistic piece of idealization. There’s something rather anomalous and tragicomic about a professor of classical literature becoming a mass-cultural hero, adored for that book that doesn’t take any effort to read and doesn’t assault you with sex, sex, sex. Surely it’s occurred to him that Plautus would have gone for Portnoy’s Complaint.

One infers the ambivalence from the writing, which is surpris­ingly awkward. It was a chore to get beyond the following sentence on page 2: “I ambled over to the reserve desk to get one of the tomes that would bail me out on the morrow.” Huh?

Segal drops this unwieldy sportive—if that’s what it is—diction for his first-person narrator after a while, but the falsely snappy note remains in the dialogue:

“What the hell makes you so smart?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t go for coffee with you,” she answered.

“Listen—I wouldn’t ask you.”

“That,” she replied, “is what makes you stupid.”

To put it mildly, this is not particularly witty or winning repar­tee, and characters who speak it sound rather subhuman. “Listen—I wouldn’t ask you” also sounds a bit echt Jewish for the hero, a Harvard WASP named Oliver Barrett IV, and the heroine, an Ital­ian-Catholic Radcliffe girl, often repeats this locution. Is it inten­tional, accidental, mistaken, gratuitous? Who knows? I doubt if Segal himself does. What he’s probably done is simply indulge an indiscriminate personal taste in kitsch, schmaltz, and whimsical-whamsical banter. He doesn’t get it quite right, but if the rest of us are similar softies it won’t matter. Finally, even the lousy emotional punch lines, like the heroine’s great, dubious platitude, “Love means not ever having to say you’re sorry,” will touch the heart while they insult the ear and the brain.

The story’s basic sentimental notion is derived from Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Ollie Barrett, the emotionally buttoned-up rich boy, is humanized by his marriage to Jenny Cavilleri, the warm, gay, mag­nanimous poor girl. The denouement partakes a little more of Camille. Jenny dies of leukemia, but her death results in the recon­ciliation of Ollie and his estranged Brahmin father.

At least this was the way it was supposed to work in print. There were stumbling blocks—the synthetic nature of the writing, the bathos, and, largest of all, a nauseating proportion of masochism. It was extremely distasteful to hear the smart little heroine getting the last aphoristic-shrewish word on her husband from first ac­quaintance to last gasp. Much of the book’s appeal depends upon our sharing the hero’s unattractive and life-denying notion that he was unworthy of this brave, noble, beautiful, understanding crea­ture. Scenes like the following inspire one to question her divinity:

“It’s nobody’s fault, you preppie bastard,” she was saying. “Would you please stop blaming yourself!”

I wanted to keep looking at her because I wanted to never take my eyes from her, but still I had to lower my eyes. I was so ashamed that even now Jenny was reading my mind so perfectly.

“Screw Paris,” she said suddenly.

“Screw Paris and music and all the crap you think you stole from me. I don’t care, you sonovabitch. Can’t you believe that?”

“No,” I answered truthfully.

“Then get the hell out of here,” she said. “I don’t want you at my goddamn deathbed.”

The Camille you love to hate?

The movie, as one would expect, is virtually word for word from the original “book,” and Arthur Hiller’s direction—now clumsy, now obvious—is syntactically faithful to the author’s prose. How­ever, there are some new stumbling blocks, which will require re­doubled efforts at ignoring reality and surrendering to fantasy on the part of customers who want their money’s worth.

To get away with a role like Jenny on screen, an actress doesn’t need great talent. It will be enough if she simply looks beautiful and warm. For some reason, Ali MacGraw has been allowed to “interpret” the role, and she plays it as superciliously as the hero­ine’s worst lines read. It’s a performance that only makes sense if one decides that it’s satirical—maybe a Wellesley girl’s revenge on snotty-superior Radcliffe girls.

Miss MacGraw wears a permanently smug expression and fails to temper the vain, emotionally bullying tone of the dialogue. I realize there are people who still find her adorable, but I thought it one of the most effectively hateful characterizations I’d ever seen. When this little angel breathed her last, remorse and I were light-years apart. The performance is so wrongheaded that the emotional balance of the material turns upside-down: one prefers Oli­ver, in the amiable, steady presence of Ryan O’Neal, to Jenny.

Because Miss MacGraw is coming on shallow and disagreeable, viewers will almost have to substitute real loved ones or themselves for “the beautiful girl now dead.” The film’s one stroke of genius is to make this imaginative substitution more likely by building in longeurs.

There are lots and lots of longeurs in the final reel. Ryan O’Neal, stricken by the news of his beloved’s incurable illness, is discovered sleepwalking his way along Fifth Avenue, while Francis Lai’s som­berly schmaltzy, fake-Chopin piano score encourages us to get way down in the mopey spirit of things. If you’re sufficiently detached, you may feel a bit cheated: why not real Chopin, or red Rachman­inoff. instead of these cheesy imitations? Still, this is beside the point: people do begin to snivel in precisely the way the movie begs them to.

It’s interesting to note, finally, that the movie drops the reconcil­iation scene between Oliver and his father (played by Milland— and it’s quite disconcerting to see him aged and baldish). Instead, Oliver leaves poor old Dad with the same morally superior egg-on-the-face that Jenny used to dish out to him. One is compelled to conclude that this truly stupefying lack of generosity is the Great Lesson of Their Love. Real sweeties, these two.

Presumably, the new ending is intended to feed the resentments and moral vanity of the young audience. In a work this flagrant to begin with, maybe anything goes, but if I were the film makers I’d shoot the original conciliatory ending and give audiences a choice. Ideally, one would have a twin theater and get the kids for the version where Oliver is a snob and parents for the version where Oliver cries in his father’s arms. It’s one of the few messy but profitable possibilities the men responsible for this jerker seem to neglect.

by Arthur Knight Saturday Review

In these days when the old movie formula seems to have been reduced to boy meets girl, boy gets girl, period, there is something not only refreshing but downright exhilarating about Love Story, a frankly sentimental, frankly tear-jerking, four-handkerchief picture. It reminds us, suddenly, of what movies once were all about: the kind of unabashed emotional involvement with beauti­ful, admirable characters whose triumphs and woes we shared so completely that we laughed and wept and cowered helplessly in our chairs, then left the theater still in the thrall of a catharsis that was all the more joyous because it reaffirmed our essential humanity. If we could respond so readily to those shadows, perhaps we could also respond to real people.

Since Erich Segal’s brief novel (developed, incidentally, from his screenplay, and not, as is customary, the other way around) has been a runaway best seller since publication, presumably just about everyone in America knows that it is a combination of Cinderella and Iloratio Alger, transplanted to Radcliffe and Harvard, and given the twist of an unhappy ending. Cinderella dies of an un­specified but incurable disease, and nobody lives happily ever after. What even the most ardent devotee of the novel will be unpre­pared for, however, is the emotional intensity achieved by its young stars, Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal, by Francis Lai’s affecting and often inventive score, and by Arthur Hiller’s unobtrusive yet probing direction.

While Miss MacGraw and the engagingly handsome O’Neal could probably carry the picture on their charm alone, Hiller never makes this necessary. He lets their relationship—he the scion of a wealthy Boston family, she the daughter of a humble Italian baker —unfold and enfold through innumerable small, affecting details. There is O’Neal’s original hostility to a “Radcliffe bitch,” and the girl’s self-protective scoffing despite her obvious attraction to the young man. There is a delightful sequence of horseplay in the snow and, for once, a serious premarital discussion of how marriage might affect their respective careers. The visits to the prospective in­laws are beautifully managed, particularly in the choice of flash­backs to highlight the girl’s reception into the chilly bosom of the Brahmin family.

Best of all is a quarrel that flares up between the newlyweds when the girl tries vainly to effect a reconciliation between her husband and his estranged father. The crosscurrent of emotions in each of them is extraordinarily visible with a minimum of words; when she runs out of the apartment, it leads to a prolonged search through the corridors of a music conservatory (she was a music student) ingeniously orchestrated by Lai as O’Neal dashes from one rehearsal room to the next. When he at last finds her, shiver­ing on the porch of their apartment building, he is abject with apologies. “Love,” she tells him, “means never having to say you’re sorry.” It is a small enough nugget of wisdom to carry away from a picture, but it is embedded in such a flow of emotion that one grasps at it as at a profound truth.

For Ali MacGraw, Love Story merely confirms what Goodbye, Columbus earlier suggested—that, properly handled, she is one of the most attractive and capable young actresses around. For Ryan O’Neal, who has been floundering in a succession of second-rate pictures, this film should mean instant stardom. No less impressive are John Marley and Ray Milland in the relatively minor roles of the two fathers. But when an entire cast is as consistently good as this one is, it is generally because of the director, and Arthur Hiller, who demonstrated that he could tap the emotions in last year’s Popi, here has struck the mother lode. I predict that, like Airport, Love Story is going to bring back to the theaters large sections of that “lost audience” that hasn’t gone to a movie in years.

by Philip T. Hartung Commonweal

Not having read Erich Segal’s novel, Love Story, I came on the movie cold. In spite of the tears one is supposed to shed at this contrived film, I left it—still cold. Since the picture opens with the girl’s funeral and then consists of a long flashback showing the boy and girl meeting, dating, falling in love, sleeping together, getting married (in a sort of do-it-yourself ceremony), enjoying life in an elegant New York apartment, it comes as no surprise that the girl dies. What did surprise me, however, is the girl’s continued use of foul language, particularly the popular four-letter word for ordure. It seems to me that if scriptwriter Segal wanted to indicate how mod this girl is, he could have let her use the word once or twice. But Ali MacGraw uses it again and again—even in the classroom where she is teaching youngsters. So, long before this Jenny dies, I was tired of her aggressive modishness. As the young man from the very wealthy Boston family, Ryan O’Neal is fine. So are the music and good photography.

Screen: Perfection and a ‘Love Story’: Erich Segal’s Romantic Tale Begins Run

by Vincent Canby The New York Times , December 18, 1970

What can you say about a movie about a 25-year-old girl who died? That it is beautiful. And romantic. That it contains a fantasy for just about everyone, perhaps with the exception of Herbert Marcuse. That it looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made. That my admiration for the mechanics of it slops over into a real admiration for the movie itself. I’m talking, of course, about Love Story , the movie from which Erich Segal extracted his best-selling non-novel, mostly, it seems, by appending “she said’s” and “I said’s” and an occasional “I remonstrated” to the dialogue in his original screenplay. The film, which opened yesterday at the Loew’s State I and Tower East Theaters, is about a love affair so perfect that even the death that terminates it becomes a symbol of its perfection. When, at the end, Jenny (née Cavilleri), the self-styled social zero from Cranston, R. I., the daughter of an Italian baker, is dying of a carefully unidentified blood disease in the arms of her husband, Oliver Barrett 4th, the preppie millionaire from Boston, there is nothing to disfigure love, or faith, or even the complexion. It’s as if she were suffering from some kind of vaguely unpleasant Elizabeth Arden treatment. Jenny doesn’t die. She just slips away in beauty. The knowledge that Jenny will—how should I put it—disappear not only gives the movie its shape (it is told in flashback), but it also endows everything—from a snowball fight in the Harvard Yard to a confrontation with snob parents in Ispwich—with an intensity that is no less sweet for being fraudulent. Curiously, the novel, which I found almost unreadable (I think it might be as readily absorbed if kept under one’s pillow), plays very well as a movie, principally, I suspect because Jenny is not really Jenny but Ali MacGraw, a kind of all-American, Radcliffe madonna figure, and Oliver Barrett 4th is really Ryan O’Neal, an intense, sensitive young man whose handsomeness has a sort of crookedness to it that keeps him from being a threat to male members of the audience. They are both lovely. Then, too, Arthur Hiller, the director, has framed what is essentially a two-character story of undergraduate love with such seeming simplicity that nothing confuses the basic situation. He also associates his film and his characters with all of the good things in life. Jenny and Oliver fall in love in the snow (snow, clean and pure, is very important in the movie.) They court in front of libraries, and they make love (nothing too explicit mind you) while doing homework. When Jenny swears, she fondly uses a four-letter word that was shocking in the fifties, but that even mid-American matrons have heard now. When Oliver graduates from law school, he takes a job with an old, extremely respectable, New York law firm, but it’s one that specializes in civil-rights cases. When Jenny is growing weaker, she can’t remember the Mozart Köchel listings she once knew. Jenny and Oliver have (middle) class. Love Story not only revives a kind of movie fiction that I’d thought vanished, it also revives the rich, WASP movie hero who rebels, but not too drastically, and it brings back the kind of wonderful movie aphorism that persists in saying nothing when it tries to say the most (“love means never having to say you’re sorry”). Francis Lai’s background score, mixes Bach and Mozart and Handel with Lai, and resolutely avoids rock. Although Jenny does disappear at the end, everyone in the audience can take heart in identification—the ladies, because they can see how much will be missed, and the gentlemen, who will have the honor of being abandoned by one of fiction’s most blessed females. I might add that Oliver, though distraught, is also very rich, and he has promised Jenny to be a merry widower. I can’t remember any movie of such comparable high-style, kitsch since Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939) and his 1957 remake, An Affair to Remember . The only really depressing thing about Love Story is the thought of all of the terrible imitations that will inevitably follow it.

• More: Arthur Hiller , Gary Arnold , Love Story (1970) , Movie reviews

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Fairy tale music swells as an ornate storybook fills the screen. "Have you ever heard the story of Alida and Taroo?," asks star Jennifer Lopez with a compelling earnestness. The storybook’s illustrations come to life as Lopez proceeds to narrate the Puerto Rican myth about star-crossed lovers from warring tribes who are transformed by the gods into a red flower and blue hummingbird. Lopez, who wrote and conceived "This Is Me … Now: A Love Story" a companion film to her first album in a decade (also called This Is Me … Now ), uses this myth to trace the ups and downs of her own life which seems, at last, to have found its own fairy tale ending through her romantic reunion with and marriage to Ben Affleck (who makes a very cheeky cameo reminiscent of his 2008 SNL appearance mocking Keith Olbermann.)

After this magical prelude, the story cuts to J. Lo on the back of a motorcycle, her face pure bliss as she holds tightly to the driver while the two careen down a picturesque mountainous beachscape. That is until the motorcycle crashes, the two separate, and the picture crumbles, leaving Lopez stranded in an apocalyptic steampunk heart factory. Here we get the film’s first musical interlude "Hearts and Flowers," its lyrics as cheesy and earnest as Lopez's narration. "I made it through the rain, the trauma and the pain," she sings as she and the factory workers — styled a la Fritz Lang's "Metropolis” — frenetically work to refill the breaking metal heart with the petals of red flowers, all which seem to have wilted away. 

Although Lopez's vocals have a little too much autotune for my taste, her dance moves are as energetic and crisp as ever. In the sequence set to the song " Rebound ," couples residing in a glass house are bound to each other with pieces of long, colored cloth. When they pull away, the cloth yanks them back together like yo-yos, in choreography in the Tanztheater style pioneered by the late German modern dancer Pina Bausch. Another sequence set in a group therapy session draws inspiration from “Mein Herr” from “ Cabaret ,” with Lopez bringing a stripped-down emotional rawness to the choreography.

The film weaves back and forth between these dreamlike sequences set to tracks from her new album, therapy sessions Lopez has with her good friend Fat Joe , and some truly unhinged moments with a group of astrological stars (played by literal stars Jane Fonda , Post Malone , Keke Palmer , Jennifer Lewis , Kim Petras , Jay Shetty , Sofia Vergara , Neil deGrasse Tyson, Trevor Noah , and Sadhguru) known as the Zodiacal Council. Although each star plays one of the corresponding Zodiac signs, hilariously there is no representation for Aquarius or Capricorn. I'll let the astrology girlies figure that one out. Of these vignettes the ones with Fat Joe work the best due to his calming energy and the strong rapport after decades of professional collaborations and friendship. Oscar-nominee Paul Raci also brings his steadfast presence to one of the more successful vignettes as the leader of a Romantics Anonymous group therapy session.

Along with using the lyrics of her songs and the film's visuals as both a therapy session and confessional about the star's personal life, Lopez also explores how aspects of her filmography were part of her romantic self-expression, for better or for worse. The visuals accompanying the album's first single "Can't Get Enough" not only poke fun at Lopez's three failed marriages, they also play around with her star persona in romantic comedies (especially wedding-set ones like " The Wedding Planner ,” “ Marry Me ,” and " Shotgun Wedding "). Later a cheesy monologue she delivers about believing in soulmates is interrupted by Fat Joe saying time is up for their session and after yet another breakup she's seen watching " The Way We Were " mouthing along to Barbra Streisand's lines. Part of what made her such an alluring romance star came from Lopez being herself a hopeless romantic. She brings an open tenderness to her rom-com roles because she understands them, and she understands fans of them. She never once looks down on the genre as something lesser. 

"This Is Me … Now: A Love Story" is both a therapeutic confessional and a grand, romantic fantasy. Unfortunately, it is often hindered by lackluster CGI visuals, uneven editing, and awkward staging and camera set ups. Director Dave Meyers just doesn't ever quite have a handle on Lopez's vision. In an homage to " Singin' in the Rain " Lopez perfectly matches Gene Kelly's glee in that film’s iconic rain scene, yet the way Meyers frames the star muffles the scene's intended magic. 

Regardless of its technical faults, there is bravery here as Lopez opens up her old wounds for all to see, sharing her biggest mistakes, her deepest scars, and the work she put in to heal herself first, before she could be ready for the love story that she grew up so desperately wishing for. That she keeps her happy ending all to herself might leave some viewers cold, but I think after decades of intense media scrutiny nearly tearing them apart, Bennifer 2.0 have earned their quiet little place in the sun.

On Amazon Prime on Friday.

Marya E. Gates

Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture. 

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Screen: Perfection and a 'Love Story':Erich Segal's Romantic Tale Begins Run

By Vincent Canby

• Dec. 18, 1970

What can you say about a movie about a 25-year-old girl who died?That it is beautiful. And romantic. That it contains a fantasy for just about everyone, perhaps with the exception of Herbert Marcuse. That it looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made. That my admiration for the mechanics of it slops over into a real admiration for the movie itself.I'm talking, of course, about "Love Story," the movie from which Erich Segal extracted his best-selling non-novel, mostly, it seems, by appending "she said's" and "I said's" and an occasional "I remonstrated" to the dialogue in his original screenplay.The film, which opened yesterday at the Loew's State I and Tower East Theaters, is about a love affair so perfect that even the death that terminates it becomes a symbol of its perfection.When, at the end, Jenny (née Cavilleri), the self-styled social zero from Cranston, R. I., the daughter of an Italian baker, is dying of a carefully unidentified blood disease in the arms of her husband, Oliver Barrett 4th, the preppie millionaire from Boston, there is nothing to disfigure love, or faith, or even the complexion. It's as if she were suffering from some kind of vaguely unpleasant Elizabeth Arden treatment. Jenny doesn't die. She just slips away in beauty.The knowledge that Jenny will—how should I put it—disappear not only gives the movie its shape (it is told in flashback), but it also endows everything — from a snowball fight in the Harvard Yard to a confrontation with snob parents in Ispwich—with an intensity that is no less sweet for being fraudulent.Curiously, the novel, which I found almost unreadable (I think it might be as readily absorbed if kept under one's pillow), plays very well as a movie, principally, I suspect because Jenny is not really Jenny but Ali MacGraw, a kind of all-American, Radcliffe madonna figure, and Oliver Barrett 4th is really Ryan O'Neal, an intense, sensitive young man whose handsomeness has a sort of crookedness to it that keeps him from being a threat to male members of the audience. They are both lovely.Then, too, Arthur Hiller, the director, has framed what is essentially a two-character story of undergraduate love with such seeming simplicity that nothing confuses the basic situation. He also associates his film and his characters with all of the good things in life. Jenny and Oliver fall in love in the snow (snow, clean and pure, is very important in the movie.) They court in front of libraries, and they make love (nothing too explicit mind you) while doing homework.When Jenny swears, she fondly uses a four-letter word that was shocking in the fifties, but that even mid-American matrons have heard now. When Oliver graduates from law school, he takes a job with an old, extremely respectable, New York law firm, but it's one that specializes in civil-rights cases. When Jenny is growing weaker, she can't remember the Mozart Köchel listings she once knew. Jenny and Oliver have (middle) class."Love Story" not only revives a kind of movie fiction that I'd thought vanished, it also revives the rich, WASP movie hero who rebels, but not too drastically, and it brings back the kind of wonderful movie aphorism that persists in saying nothing when it tries to say the most ("love means never having to say you're sorry").Francis Lai's background score, mixes Bach and Mozart and Handel with Lai, and resolutely avoids rock. Although Jenny does disappear at the end, everyone in the audience can take heart in identification—the ladies, because they can see how much will be missed, and the gentlemen, who will have the honor of being abandoned by one of fiction's most blessed females. I might add that Oliver, though distraught, is also very rich, and he has promised Jenny to be a merry widower.I can't remember any movie of such comparable high-style, kitsch since Leo McCarey's "Love Affair" (1939) and his 1957 remake, "An Affair to Remember." The only really depressing thing about "Love Story" is the thought of all of the terrible imitations that will inevitably follow it.

The CastLOVE STORY, directed by Arthur Hiller; written by Erich Eegal; director of photography, Dick Kratina; music by Francis Lai; produced by Howard G. Minsky; released by Paramout Pictures. At Loew's State I, Broadway and 45th Street, and Tower East Theater, Third Avenue and 72d Street. Running time: 100 minutes. (The Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code and Rating Administration classifies this film: "GP—all ages admitted, parental guidance suggested.")Jenny Cavilleri . . . . . Ali MacGrawOliver Barrett 4th . . . . . Ryan O'NealOliver Barrett 3d . . . . . Ray MillandMrs. Oliver Barrett 3d . . . . . Katherine BalfourPhil Cavilleri . . . . . John MarleyDean Thompson . . . . . Russell NypeDr. Shapely . . . . . Sydney WalkerDr. Addison . . . . . Robert Modica

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• 84   Metascore
• 1 hr 39 mins
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A high society law student and middle-class musician marry; only to have their whirlwind romance come to a screeching halt when the young woman receives a cancer diagnosis.

"Love means never having to say you're sorry" was the catch phrase that helped make this a huge grosser, but we're sorry anyone ever fell in love with this script. LOVE STORY is actually better than Segal's previously released best-seller (written from his screenplay in order to promote the film). But then that's not saying much. Wistful Oliver (O'Neal) is at Harvard (of course) in his final pre-law year, when he meets and falls for tragic Jenny (MacGraw), a music student at Radcliffe (where else?). She's a rude mite from a lower-class family, and he is one of the Boston Brahmins. You can guess the rest. O'Neal and MacGraw go together like applesauce spread on sandpaper, and the rest of the cast (except John Marley) comes across as a series of caricatures. Milland, in particular, as Oliver's snotty father, acts like a billiard ball in a business suit. By the time O'Neal gets around to intoning the famous tag line, you'll be so sick of hearing Francis Lai's love theme that you'll want to strangle the projectionist. Too bad MacGraw's already bitten the dust. Paging DARK VICTORY.

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gangavathbabusingh 653 days ago

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The storyline of this movie is just amazing and The acting is also very good. Very nice movie with an amazing story. They did very good and natural-looking acting.

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మీ సమీక్షను ఇక్కడ వ్రాయండి...(ఐచ్ఛికం)

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Good performances throughout and a standout performance from Sai pallavi.

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‘The Greatest Love Story Never Told’ Review: Jennifer Lopez Learns Love’s Cost in Revelatory Making-Of Doc

With his unexpectedly intimate chronicle of her $20 million passion project "This Is Me...Now: A Love Story," documentarian Jason Bergh chips away at the blocks on which Lopez' pop superstardom was built.

By Todd Gilchrist

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With her ninth album “This Is Me…Now,” Jennifer Lopez promised to be more honest and vulnerable than ever before — a bookend to 2002’s “This Is Me…Then” in which she would “tell her side” of the romances that for decades have been one-dimensionally splashed across the pages of tabloids worldwide. Even as a lifelong fan, I was skeptical just how far back she’d draw the curtain given the meticulous control she’s exerted over her career.

Popular on Variety

Lopez subsequently decides to bankroll the project herself — an endeavor which Affleck observes is historically risky in Hollywood. Emboldened by members of her inner circle, including Affleck and longtime manager Benny Medina, she enlists director Dave Meyers (“I’m Real (Remix)”) and begins coordinating the logistics of the most ambitious undertaking of her career.

The production details themselves are surprisingly candid, starting with the original price tag of $30 million — later trimmed to $20 million after she is forced to finance it herself. Prospective co-stars come and go, such as Anthony Ramos (“In the Heights”), who elects to remain loyal to his pal Marc Anthony, her ex-husband. “I’m not playing me,” she counters. (Invited to play various members of a Zodiac-sign roundtable or her fictional friend circle, Taylor Swift, Jason Momoa and Khloe Kardashian all pass or are otherwise unavailable.) After Lopez reaches out to Jane Fonda, who became her friend after shooting “Monster In Law” together in 2005, the elder headline magnet worries first about putting this album into the world at all, then about whether or not it will be perceived as sincere. “I was so worried about Ben after the Grammys,” Fonda says, referring to Affleck’s seeming grumpiness at the 2023 ceremony, before Lopez reassures her.

When not otherwise choosing between different viscosities of mud or fretting over an inoperable conveyor belt, Lopez unexpectedly lets all of her insecurities hang out — and it is powerful stuff. Reflecting on her reunion with Affleck, she confesses that during their time apart, “I didn’t think much of myself, and so the world didn’t think much of me.” She delves into the relationships with her mother (narcissist) and father (workaholic) that led her to feel so desperate to prove her worth, both personally and professionally. Following the completion of “Rebound,” a sequence in which her character is tethered — sometimes violently — with one on-screen lover, she exhales a cathartic sigh of relief: “I’ve definitely been manhandled … and a couple of other unsavory things,” she admits.

The encouragement Affleck offers her, such as when she’s convinced that the project will be a disaster, underscores both their shared love and her inexperience with the prospect of true failure. It’s obvious she’s never before put herself out into the world with so much at stake, but you also see that it’s precisely because of his support — thoughtful and indefatigable — that she felt confident to attempt it in the first place. That Bergh defines their personalities so distinctly (there’s something perfect and darling about her complete indifference to his excitement about Meyers’ truck full of camera lenses), and yet highlights how well they complement one another, lends profundity to his portrayal of their relationship.

But even if unintentional, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” remarkably achieves the greatness to which the other two parts of this triumvirate aspire. As the career-long recipient of pervasive and too-often-unflattering media coverage, not to mention the immediate beneficiary of a career-spanning documentary just two years ago with “Halftime,” Jennifer Lopez entered her “This Is Me…Now” era running the distinct risk of overexposure. By harnessing not just the drive that made her a superstar but the fragility (especially personal) inherent in its maintenance, Jason Bergh’s film accomplishes something unexpected: offering audiences a truly new way to look at her.

Reviewed online, Feb. 20, 2024. Running time: 87 MIN.

• Production: (Documentary) A Prime Video release of an Amazon MGM Studios presentation of an Artists Equity production. Producers: Dani Bernfeld, Jason Bergh, Gillian Brown, Courtney Baxter, Lindsay Utz, Stephan Bielecki, Caitlin Alba-Rothstein, Eliza Comer.
• Crew: Director: Jason Bergh. Camera: Alexander D. Paul. Editors: Grace Zahrah, Lenny Mesina, Jennifer Horvath. Music: Meredith Ezinma Ramsay.
• With: Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Jane Fonda, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Dave Meyers, Jenifer Lewis.

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Love Story Movie Review & Rating {3/5}

Naga Chaitanya and Sai Pallavi -starrer Love Story was delayed multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns. Finally, this Shekhar Kammula 's directorial has hit the screens today and here is the review of it.

Youngsters from Armoor town of Nizamabad district, Revanth (Naga Chaitanya) and Mounika (Sai Pallavi) shift to Hyderabad in order to pursue their respective goals. Revanth runs a Zumba institute and Mounika finds her place in the IT sector. After realising that the software industry is not her cup of tea, Mounika joins as a dance trainer in Revanth's institute. As time passes, both of them fall in love. But things turn difficult for them because Revanth is a Dalit Christian and Mounika is a Zamindari Patel. How the couple faced the caste hurdles form the major crux of the movie.

Performances:

Naga Chaitanya has done an excellent job as a typical Telangana lad Revanth. His diction is good and he fit into the shoes of the character very well. Love Story will definitely become one of the major showreels of his acting career.

Sai Pallavi has got yet another meaty role and she performed with ease. Her combination with Shekhar Kammula is working big time. Eeshwari Rao got an author-backed role and she performed very well. Devayani was decent as Sai Pallavi's mother. Rajeev Kanakala's role is okayish. Uttej was good in his small yet important character. Rest others justified their character requirements.

Technical Aspects:

Director Shekhar Kammula already said that this movie will not be like his regular romantic comedies. It deals with caste and class issues that our society is facing even now. Though this is not the first film to deal with those issues, Shekhar's mark makes it a unique experience.

Pawan Ch's music is a major advantage of the film. Already, the songs have become chartbusters and now, he scored brownie points with the background score. Vijay C Kumar's cinematography is beautiful. He captured rural Telangana and Hyderabad very well. The production values are great. The editing by Marthand K Venkatesh is decent.

Love Story's first half is entertaining and is in a typical Shekhar Kammula's style but it takes a dark turn in the second half. Generally, we don't expect these kinds of stories from star heroes but Naga Chaitanya should be commended for choosing this movie. The first half is entertaining but things become quite slow and predictive in the second half. We have to see how a section of viewers will receive the climax. On the whole, Love Story makes a decent watch for this weekend and may become a hit at the box office.

• Sekhar Kammula
• Naga Chaitanya
• Sai Pallavi

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'The Dead Don’t Hurt' is a tender love story and a subversive Western

Justin Chang

Viggo Mortensen plays Holger Olsen in The Dead Don't Hurt. Marcel-Zyskind/Shout! Studios hide caption

One of the many charms of The Dead Don’t Hurt is that you can’t immediately tell whether it’s trying to be an old-fashioned Western or a revisionist one. It has a lot of familiar genre signposts: men riding horses across rugged landscapes, a bloody shootout in a saloon, and two actors, Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps , who bring traditional movie-star charisma to a tender love story.

But at times the film feels casually subversive. The first of those horsemen we see is not a cowboy but a knight in shining armor — a figure out of a child’s fantastical dream. And then there’s the way the movie plays with time: That shootout, which technically happens at the end of the story, is instead shown at the very beginning.

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Mortensen, who wrote and directed the movie, trusts us to know the Western well enough by now that he can play around with the form without losing our attention. He isn’t attempting a radical reinvention of the genre, but he is using its conventions to tell a different and politically resonant kind of story.

It’s especially significant that the two lead characters are both immigrants. Mortensen stars as Holger Olsen, a wandering Danish-born carpenter who finds himself in San Francisco in the 1860s. That’s where he meets Vivienne, a French Canadian florist, played by Krieps, who’s every bit as independent-minded as he is.

Vicky Krieps is a French Canadian florist in The Dead Don't Hurt. Marcel Zyskind/Shout! Studios hide caption

The two fall in love, and Vivienne moves with Olsen to a dusty Nevada town called Elk Flats. Because the story is told out of sequence, we already know some bad things are headed their way, but for now, the mood is light and even comical as Vivienne grouchily sets about tidying their wooden shack of a home.

Vivienne isn’t one for domestic confinement, and she soon gets a job bartending at the saloon, where she catches the eye of one of the nastiest customers in town: Weston Jeffries, played by Solly McLeod, the brutish son of a wealthy rancher. Meanwhile, with the Civil War under way, Olsen decides to join the Union Army, to Vivienne’s fury.

One of the best things about The Dead Don’t Hurt is that it honors Vivienne’s grit and capability while also acknowledging how alone and vulnerable she is in this hostile, male-dominated environment. Several months after Olsen leaves, Vivienne gives birth to a baby boy under circumstances that are shrouded in some mystery. Years later, Olsen returns to Vivienne and the child, but it isn’t an entirely happy reunion, and they face a grim reckoning with the town and some of its most corrupt individuals.

Mortensen made his feature directing debut with the 2020 drama Falling , in which he played a gay man trying to take care of his ailing, bigoted father. With The Dead Don’t Hurt , he uses a story set in the past to comment on issues that are still with us in the present, from male violence against women to the complexity of immigrant relationships with their adopted country. Even as Vivienne embraces her life as an American settler, she proudly clings to her French Canadian roots, sometimes dreamily recalling the stories her mother told her about Joan of Arc — an obvious hero for a woman trying to forge her own unorthodox path through life.

As a director, Mortensen handles the material with quiet assurance; even when he cuts back and forth through time, he never loses the narrative thread. He also gives a gently grounded performance as Olsen, a decent man who sometimes makes impulsive, reckless decisions.

But this is ultimately Krieps’ movie. She’s often played women chafing against their proscribed stations in life, in dramas like Phantom Thread and Corsage . Here, she captures the indomitable spirit of a woman who’s making her way in a strange land and is determined to find and nurture beauty in even the harshest circumstances.

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Love Story review: Naga Chaitanya captivates in Sekhar Kammula’s best film yet

Love story movie review: sekhar kammula delivers an entertainer with naga chaitanya and sai pallavi that also touches your heart..

If director Sekhar Kammula’s Love Story was meant to revive the faith of Telugu filmmakers in theatrical releases, the film has more than done its job. An industry that was reeling under the pandemic-induced losses needed a film that reinvigorates the box office business by offering entertainment to the people. Love Story with Naga Chaitanya and Sai Pallavi in the lead does that, and more. With its foot-tapping music, captivating dance moves and engaging script, it gives you bang for your buck and then delivers a social commentary that you take home with you.

Chaitanya and Sai dance their heart out but Love Story really catches you in its silent moments. The film has a sense of urgency and relevance as Sekhar examines the issues of caste and sexual violence in our society. Love Story is easily Sekhar’s most powerful and intense film yet.

Revanth (Naga Chaitanya) and Mouni (Sai Pallavi) hail from the same village but they are separated by their caste identities. Their ambition to escape from the shackles of society brings them to Hyderabad . While Revanth wants to make it big as a Zumba dance instructor, Mouni wants to secure a well-paying corporate job, which would allow her to get away from her abusive uncle. Revanth and Mouni, who are neighbours in Hyderabad, gradually fall in love with each other over their shared passion for dance. The all-pervasive caste distinctions, however, eventually catch up with them, shattering their dreams.

Sekhar takes a familiar premise and effectively weaves together a memorable narrative, exploring the far-reaching effects of caste discrimination, gender bias, and sexual violence. The movie also calls out the hesitancy of the public in questioning society’s regressive thinking.

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Naga Chaitanya delivers his career-best performance in this film. Sai Pallavi’s performance and composer Pawan Ch’s score add value to the film.

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Review: Love Story

Article by Satya B Published by GulteDesk --> Published on: 10:27 am, 24 September 2021 | Updated on 2:34 pm, 25 September 2021

2 Hr 37 Mins   |   Love   |   24-09-2021

Cast - Naga Chaitanya,Sai Pallavi, Ragiv Kanakala and Others

Director - Sekhar Kammula

Producer - Narayan Das K Narang; Puskar Ram Mohan Rao

Banner - Amigos Creations, Sree Venkateswara Cinemas

Music - Pawan

Sekhar Kammula’s Love Story with Naga Chaitanya and Sai Pallavi had a long wait for theatrical release and finally, the movie hit the screens. Brand Sekhar Kammula already enjoys a huge fan base among the class audience and his Love Story raised the expectations with the very talented Sai Pallavi in it. Sekhar claimed the Love Story to be a different movie from his usual style and many are also curious to see how Naga Chaitanya fits in the Kammula-style direction. The movie is out with chartbuster songs and huge expectations. Let us get into the review now.

What Is It About?

A lower-caste youngster Revanth (Naga Chaitanya) lives in the city, running a Zumba dance institute on his penthouse with little earnings from it. He aims to become successful in the business but his financial and family background does not support him much. Mouni (Sai Pallavi) comes to the city with IT job aspirations but ends up becoming a partner in Revanth’s Zumba dance institute. They fall in love, but Mouni’s upper-caste becomes an obstacle in the form of Mouni’s uncle Narasimham (Rajeev Kanakala). Mouni is dead-scared of Narasimham for a strong reason already. How Revanth and Mouni overcome these issues to keep their ‘love’ alive forms the ‘story’.

Performances

Naga Chaitanya appears as a Telangana chap and he tried the slang too. His accent won’t sound great and it is neither bad. Picking a movie that is partially based on dance is an adventure to Naga Chaitanya who is not excellent at it. But he improved his moves too and did well, though we cannot compare it to that of Sai Pallavi. While he improved his acting skills too, the performance can’t be blamed for a poor plot.

Sai Pallavi has the ease and presence on the screen that she eats up everyone else in the frame and all the spotlights turn to her. As always she did very well in the role she was given. Needless to say, her dances are a treat to the eyes. Chay says ‘Varshamlo Nemali lekka’ after she dances for the first time for the ‘Evo Evo’ song on the terrace..and the comparison is so apt. Sai Pallavi did what she was told to do as Mouni, except that her role was not written well.

Rajeev Kanakala is okay as a baddie and he does not have much to perform here. Gangavva brings few laughs though she appears in very few scenes. Mail fame Gouri Priya will be there in many scenes in the first half but was not given a prominent role. Devayani is fine as Sai Pallavi’s mother. Uttej and others are fine in their roles.

Technicalities

Love Story’s songs are a big success already. Saranga Dariya is very colorful and great to watch. Almost all songs are good. Background music is fine. Cinematography is also fine. Editing could have been better. The screenplay is alright. Run time of 156 minutes is a culprit, as we can feel a slow down in some places in first half and many in second half.

Sai Pallavi Songs

Thumbs Down

Clumsy and half baked story Lag in Second half Abrupt ending

Sekhar Kammula’s previous movies earning him fame for making classy stuff that attracts overseas and class audiences mostly. Love Story too appeared to be one of his marks, but it is a complete misfire. A very good performer in the female lead, good songs, Telangana backdrop, and many other factors made it look like a Kammula movie, but the story itself with too many clumsy conflicts lost it big time.

A lower-casted youngster falling for an upper-casted girl is not uncommon for many film stories off late. But both Chay and Sai Pallavi’s roles here are matured enough to understand the consequences and they act accordingly. While the love story in the first half is mostly about dance and the institute, the scenes of discrimination and insult also were shown.

The love track between Chaitanya and Sai Pallavi is just a song and few scenes, which look artificial mostly. Before we could find depth in their love story, the caste discrimination scenes come up. The scenes where he was told that business is not for folks from a lower caste, don’t make sense at a later point as the aspirations to prove himself in the same business vanish into the thin air.

The lead role shuts down all his dreams and leaves for Dubai to work for odd jobs there. The typical Dubai kind of scenes like finding a small room to stay, wearing an apron to work for a daily job, walking in the sands give us the feels of peak monotony and cliche.

While the lovers try to find a way to get married with the caste-based hurdles, the point of child molestation comes up, which the director keeps under the wraps until pre-climax. The director fails to justify the love story part, just like he did with the caste-based discrimination and child molestation. He picked too many conflicts in which he could coordinate between none.

While the clumsy merry-go-round of multiple issues goes on, the director walks us out with an abrupt ending where the protagonist puts an end to everybody’s villain after uttering some strong dialogues and throwing some punches. The Love Story is an outdated inter-caste love story that also has a point of ‘me too’, but justifies no point by the end.

Love Story does not look like the work of the director who delivered a cult-like Leader or a classic like Fidaa, not even close.

Bottom line: Age Old Love Story

Rating: 2.75 /5

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Love Story Review: Matured Narration

Movie: Love Story Rating: 3/5 Banner: Sree Venkateswara Cinemas Cast: Naga Chaitanya, Sai Pallavi, Easwari Rao, Devyani, Rajeev Kanakala, Uttej, and others Cinematography: Vijay C Kumar Music: Pawan CH Producers: Narayan Das K Narang Puskar Ram Mohan Rao Written and directed by: Sekhar Kammula  Release Date: Sep 24, 2021

One film that has occupied media space for a long time is Sekhar Kammula’s “Love Story”, one of the most-anticipated Telugu films. He teams up with Naga Chaitanya for the first. It also marks his second combination with Sai Pallavi after Fidaa (2017).

Amidst the hype, the film hit theaters today. Let’s analyze.

Story: Revanth (Naga Chaitanya), a youngster with ambitions to achieve something in life, runs a Zumba center in Hyderabad. He hails from Armoor in Telangana and is a Christian.

Mounika (Sai Pallavi), an engineering graduate, comes from the same village to Hyderabad to find a job. Her room is adjacent to Revanth’s Zumba center.

She is also from Armoor but they have not met before as she is from a higher community and rich. Her uncle Narasimham (Rajeev Kanakala) holds a tight grip on their family and financial matters. 

Seeking freedom from the clutches of her uncle, she decides to stay in Hyderabad and joins as a partner in Revanth’s Zumba center. They begin to fall in love with each other.

What will happen if her uncle gets to know her love story?

Artistes’ Performances: For the first time in his career, Naga Chaitanya has portrayed a role with so much conviction. As a lower-caste Telangana youngster, he has done a remarkable job. His sincere efforts in getting the dialect can be noticed. This is his career-best performance.

Sai Pallavi once again excels in the role of Mounika. With her impeccable dance skills and nuanced performance, she steals the hearts. Sai Pallavi gets a complex and emotionally charged character and she doesn’t falter a moment. She holds the scenes. 

Senior actress Eeswari Rao as Chaitanya’s mother is excellent. Devyani, Rajeev Kanakala, and Uttej also leave a strong mark.

Technical Excellence: There is no need to mention that the songs have already chartbusters. Newcomer Pawan’s music is the main pillar of this film. The background score is also terrific.

Cinematographer Vijay C Kumar captures the moments neatly. The production design is apt.  

Highlights: Naga Chaitanya’s performance Sai Pallavi’s magic Emotional moments Music

Drawback: Hurried climax Slow-pace

Analysis Addressing caste discrimination has become a regular feature in Tollywood lately. Not completely moving away from his style of presenting sensible love stories, director Sekhar Kammula touches upon two important issues – caste discrimination and sexual abuse.

“Love Story”, starring Naga Chaitanya and Sai Pallavi, as the title says, is a love story but is not a chirpy drama as Kammula’s previous film “Fidaa” was. It is more of a serious film, with a realistic approach. 

“Love Story” begins on a somber note. It takes a while to get into the groove. The film picks up when Sai Pallavi grooves to the song “Evo Evo Kalale..Tara Ram Pam” in a gay abandon. Sai Pallavi mesmerizes with her dance steps in this song. Even from the narrative point, it sets the tone for the rest of the romance.

Their romantic thread cutting from Hyderabad to Armoor engages us. There are simple, yet beautiful moments here. 

After engaging in romantic drama in the first, the film comes to the core point of the issue. The class differences come to the fore, and the movie turns into a serious drama. However, in a sudden jolt, the penultimate portion deals with another issue (sexual abuse).

While the climax makes our hearts heavy, it also gives the feeling that the director has suddenly changed the tone. The climax portion makes different from the other regular movies that have dealt with caste issues like ‘Uppena’, ‘Sridevi Soda Center, etc. But care should have been taken for better results. There is a hurried feeling.

The second issue that is dealt with in the film may not be palatable to a section of the audience. However, Kammula took a risk. 

Sekhar Kammula’s films always suffer from bloating. Sharp editing has never been his strength. “Love Story” also does have this drawback. This is the reason why the film loses grip in the middle portion.

But Sekhar leaves his mark with some terrific scenes – like Sai Pallavi slipping her tongue about Chaitanya’s caste and her love proposal, sanitary pad episode, sequences with Easwari and Naga Chaitanya stand out.

All in all, despite slow narration, “Love Story” scores high on excellent performances from the lead pair, music, and some emotional sequences. But if you are looking for a cheerful romantic comedy, you might be disappointed. It is a sensible romantic drama with two important issues. Watch it for music, and the lead pair. 

Bottom line: Captivating music and Sai Pallavi's magic

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The Dead Don't Hurt Review: Vicky Krieps and Viggo Mortensen Shine

Quick links, the dead don't hurt is an old west love story with a twist, the acting and filmmaking of the dead don't hurt.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is Viggo Mortensen’s second outing as writer-director. His feature debut, 2020’s Falling, was a moving father/son dementia drama that garnered mostly positive reviews. Mortensen had cinematographer Marcel Zyskind ( As in Heaven ), production designers Carol Spier ( Eastern Promises ) and Jason Clarke ( Black Mirror), as well as costume designer Anne Dixon ( The Song of Names ) as part of his creative team on Falling. They all return in The Dead Don’t Hurt, and like his first outing, Mortensen doesn’t follow a linear timeline here. However, this film is somewhat easier to track, and ultimately, the creative puzzle pieces fit in a moving, feminist, old-school Western love story set in the late 1800s.

Mortensen shines all around in his sophomore effort . He’s also a rare, quintupled threat here as writer, composer, producer, director, and star. That might have worked against some filmmakers, but not in The Dead Don’t Hurt, a subdued yet appealing film that often feels like a fever dream that’s hard to shake off. Credit goes to the film’s central love story, which gives the filmmakers, particularly editor Peder Pedersen, an opportunity to employ flashbacks to stitch the tale together. The concept takes getting used to, but it ultimately pays off. The Dead Don’t Hurt is a worthy, soul-stirring romantic Western, and its star, Vicky Krieps, is an absolute triumph.

The Dead Don't Hurt

Release Date May 31, 2024

Director Viggo Mortensen

Cast Rafel Plana, Shane Graham, Solly McLeod, Danny Huston, Garret Dillahunt, W. Earl Brown, Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen

Runtime 2h 9m

Main Genre Drama

• Viggo Mortensen is impressive here, managing to craft a film as the writer, composer, director, producer, and star.
• The tragic love story at the heart of the film is intriguing and well done.
• Vicky Krieps' character is fantastic, and she gives an excellent performance.
• The work of cinematographer Marcel Zyskind is stunning, making the film feel even more believable.
• The slow pace and time jumps may be too much for some audiences.

Once again, Mortensen uses his own family as inspiration for this film. Falling was a family drama that illuminated parent-child dynamics and deeply buried emotional wounds. The Dead Don’t Hurt has its fair share of wounds, too, as it leaps off a concept Mortensen had while musing about the little girl who ultimately became his mother. The film begins when a “little girl” is a woman at the end of her life. Let the time jumps begin .

We soon meet French-Canadian immigrant Vivienne Le Coudy (Krieps) as an adult. An independent woman who sells flowers in San Francisco, Vivienne meets Holger Olsen (Mortensen), a Danish immigrant. She’s intrigued. Here’s a man as bold and self-reliant as she is. They soon fall in love, and on an impulse, she decides to join him in his home in the frontier community of Elk Flats, Nevada.

23 Best Westerns on Tubi to Watch Right Now

The town has its fair share of alpha males eager to overpower. At the forefront is Weston (Solly McLeod), the shady and violent son of the town’s primary land magnate, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt). Mayor Schiller (Danny Huston) often turns a blind eye to the underhanded dealings in Elk Flats, and when Vivienne begins working in the town’s bar, her path soon collides with Weston’s, producing disastrous results. Tensions mount just before Holger agrees to fight for the Union in the Civil War , and when Vivienne is attacked by Weston, each passing day of Holger’s absence is grueling. Soon, Vivienne gives birth to a son, is forced to raise him on her own, and deals with the town’s merciless men.

A more haunting challenge awaits when Holger returns from the war . Suddenly, he and Vivienne must address a tragic event that, left unfaced, could dismantle their lives. The tragic love story element fully blooms here, allowing the film to gallop quite nicely into its final act.

It’s at this point in The Dead Don’t Hurt that you begin to understand the reasoning behind the way this story is told. More effectively, perhaps, is how well Mortensen expands the feel of a classic Western , creating a different kind of love story that clearly shatters the mold of conventional female archetypes of the time period.

Vicky Krieps loses herself in this role , delivering a performance that is as riveting as it is heart-wrenching. By circling the focus around a strong woman fully self-sufficient in the 1800s, Mortensen creates a grounded feminist Western. Other storytellers may have played things over the top, but not this one. Amidst great loss, heartache, and tragedy, Krieps’ Vivienne emerges as a breathtaking heroine.

Equally compelling is Mortensen , whose performance is even, often underplayed, sharp, and on the mark. In Holger, he gives us a man who’s endured life’s challenges, only having to find himself having to right yet another horrible wrong. It’s also quite wonderful to see Mortensen give his other stars a chance to shine the way they do here. In addition to Krieps, Solly McLeod is a commanding, ominous presence as Weston.

Viggo Mortensens 20 Best Movies, Ranked by Rotten Tomatoes

Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind delivers an impressive array of sweeping vistas, stunning landscapes, and rocky frontier settings, making this 19th-century story look and feel all the more believable. But it also reveals a kind of collective vulnerability of the time period when a flurry of danger can arise in vast open spaces at any given time.

Mortensen clearly appreciates the Western landscape but also has a deeper love for what lies within the inner landscapes of the film’s main couple. In that respect, The Dead Don’t Hurt offers both a compelling female protagonist and a unique couple who are emotionally intelligent enough to move through disappointments, arguments, and obstacles with a sense of maturity and grace. It recalls the stunning scene in Anatomy of a Fall when Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is so bold and frank during a confrontation with her husband, it leaves you speechless.

The intensity between this film's couple never quite reaches those heights, but how they move through their dilemma is powerful. It's one of the film's many great achievements. While it may take a while to grow accustomed to this film's slower pace and its time jumps, ultimately, The Dead Don't Hurt is a wonderfully moving film worthy of our attention. The Dead Don't Hurt opens in theaters on May 31. Watch the trailer below.

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Movie Review: This is her, now, in space: J.Lo heads to a new galaxy for AI love story in ‘Atlas’

This image released by Netflix shows Jennifer Lopez in a scene from “Atlas.” (Ana Carballosa/Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Jennifer Lopez in a scene from “Atlas.” (Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Sterling K. Brown in a scene from “Atlas.” (Netflix via AP)

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Let’s all be clear, if we weren’t already, that when it comes to Jennifer Lopez, it’s about the love story. Always the love story.

J.Lo the pop star, singing about rekindled love on her latest album, “This is Me … Now.” J.Lo the rom-com regular, making movies about seeking love (including the extremely autobiographical film of the same name.) J.Lo the real-life celebrity goddess, in countless headlines about … what else?

Love, for better or worse.

And so if we tell you that now, we have J.Lo in “Atlas,” playing a data analyst who travels to a planet populated solely by evil AI bots preparing to extinguish humanity, well, your only question really should be, “Where’s the love story?”

Glad you asked! Because there is one. It may not be with a human. It may actually be with a computer program. But there is one. Because “Atlas,” an often ridiculous sci-fi epic with dialogue cheesier than a Brie wheel but also an old-fashioned, human heart o’ gold, is a J.Lo movie. Through and through.

We’ll give the filmmakers some credit: “Atlas,” directed by Brad Peyton (“San Andreas”) is timely. And not just because Lopez has been in the news lately, but because the subject is AI — which has been in the news even more than Bennifer, believe it or not.

We begin our story on Earth, way off into the future, at a time where someone can say “Remember there used to be things called smartphones?” and everyone laughs. A montage of news reports informs us that things have not been going well for the human race. AI, created to advance humanity, has turned against it, killing over 1 million civilians.

The evil AI leader is Harlan (Simu Liu), who after turning on humanity has escaped to an unknown location far from Earth. But when an associate of his, Casca, is captured on Earth, the head of ICN, a coalition of nations fighting the AI menace, calls on Atlas Shepherd (Lopez) to help question him. Who better than the woman who’s devoted her life to the hunt for Harlan?

We learn Atlas is not a happy person. Also, she’s addicted to coffee – quad Americanos, to be precise. And she hates — absolutely hates — AI, for reasons unknown.

Anyway, Atlas deftly manages to obtain Harlan’s location from Casca, and soon finds herself begging to join a mission to his far-off planet to capture the villainous bot, with whom she shares a mysterious past connection. At first, mission commander Banks (Sterling K. Brown) objects strenuously, but quickly and rather illogically changes his mind. (Both Liu and Brown deserve much better roles than the generic, lifeless ones they’re given.)

Soon they’re off, to GR-39 in the Andromeda galaxy, where the ICN space rangers fall into a disastrous trap laid by Harlan. It’s here that Atlas meets the most important other person in the movie — well, not a person. It’s her AI software, who proves her crucial ally once Atlas is forced to crash land, in her mechanized battle suit, onto the planet.

The key issue is trust-building. Atlas, as we said, doesn’t trust AI. As the two get to know each other, the software gives himself (he has a “default” male voice) a name: Smith.

Atlas: “Is that really necessary?” Smith: “Names create an emotional reaction.” Atlas: “You’re a computer program.”

The plan consists of finding Harlan, defeating his dastardly plot to destroy humanity and getting off the planet – all while hopefully staying alive. At every step, Smith informs Atlas with all the data at his disposal how precisely desperate the odds are. This results in some amusing banter as Smith, voiced by Gregory James Cohan, “learns” sarcasm and humor.

As for Atlas, she needs to learn how to let down her guard – or rather, her brain walls. Her mistrust of AI leads her to stubbornly refuse (at first) Smith’s entreaties to use the “neural link” — a pathway into each other’s brains — that will vastly enhance Atlas’ chances of survival, combining her analytic capacity with Smith’s data access.

Harlan doesn’t appear until halfway into the movie, and we soon learn something about the tragic past he shares with Atlas. In any case, it’s Smith, not Harlan, that ultimately evokes real feeling from Atlas — and gives Lopez a chance to emote, which she does reasonably well given the mediocre dialogue. You could call it a futuristic triangle: Human, bad AI, good AI.

Who will win out? Our protocol, as Smith would say, doesn’t allow us to give spoilers. But you can guess one idea that emerges shining bright: It’s a four letter word that starts with “L.”

“Atlas,” a Netflix release, has been Rated PG-13 “for strong sci-fi violence, action, bloody images and strong language.” Running time: 118 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

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Like any movie genre, romance is filled with fantastic and terrible films, but when a movie is truly amazing, it can sweep any viewer off their feet, even the most cynical romantics. The following films are some of the most persuasive and admirable films about love and romance. These movies have become staples in their genre and are necessary watching for any romance fan.

What makes a romance film so great is the mix of romance and plot. While audiences may think a romance movie will only have a focus on love, the best ones actually include a solid balance of romantic situations and normal plot and character development. Furthermore, the greatest romance movies are not always happy. Although some have happy endings, others will leave you wondering how to go on with the rest of the day. Overall, the most epic love stories in movies can range in their emotions and motives, and in this way, all ten of the following films have stolen audiences' hearts and potentially stomped on them too.

10 About Time

Though it isn't as well known as other romance films, the goodness of About Time definitely cannot be diminished by its popularity. Starring Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams, the movie follows a man who discovers that he can time travel and uses this power to improve his life, namely by getting a girlfriend. However, he soon learns that his ability can't save him from all the bad things that could happen in life. This film stands out because of its unique sci-fi concept, its sunny ambiance, and the sweet love between Gleeson and McAdams. The way the pair overcomes life's normal adversities is relatable to anyone who watches it.

9 Before Sunrise Trilogy

If a romance movie becomes a trilogy, does that make it one of the best romance films of all time? Before Sunrise is a 1995 movie starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as two young people in Europe who spark a connection on a train and spend one perfect evening together. The film inspired two others, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, both of which see the couple reunited. The Before trilogy offers intense chemistry between its two actors and a feeling of melancholy as the audience knows it's a right person, wrong time romance movie . The intimate setting and scenario of these films make them a vulnerable yet satisfying watch.

8 The Princess Bride

Although many might not consider The Princess Bride a romance movie, the 1987 fantasy would certainly beat out other romance films in the love department. The film follows Cary Elwes' Westley, a young man who falls in love with Princess Buttercup (played by Robin Wright), but must overcome various obstacles so they may be together. With a fairy tale backdrop, hilarious comedy, and many iconic moments, The Princess Bride is a dynamic and well-rounded story that all begins because of romance. Westley's loyalty and love for Buttercup will no doubt warm anyone's heart.

7 If Beale Street Could Talk

Despite being a tearjerker romance movie , If Beale Street Could Talk is a perfect example of a love story that has its joys and its heartbreaks. Based on the James Baldwin novel of the same name, the film depicts the relationship between Tish and Fonny, childhood best friends who fall in love. The problem is, Fonny is accused of a crime he didn't commit, and the couple must then overcome this horrifying obstacle. In true Baldwin fashion, this story is innately human and will hit hard with any audience member. Watching the pair's love story unfold and overcome makes all the pain worth it.

6 La La Land

For audiences who want a realistic romance that may not have the happiest ending, La La Land is the perfect choice. The movie stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as two struggling artists whose passions both bring them together and tear them apart. Not only does the film have a magical, Hollywood feel to it, but it's also beautiful to look at, full of music, and dripping in heartbreak. Audiences are sure to feel a whole range of emotions watching this film and will wish their world looked as colorful. Plus, Gosling and Stone have a miraculous connection that makes their love easy to believe.

5 Moonlight

While Moonlight has many focuses apart from love, this movie definitely stands out for the aspects of romance it shows. Moonlight tells the story of Mahershala Ali's Chiron by exploring three different parts of his life. The movie focuses on sexuality and masculinity, leading to important parts about love that may not be as common in regular romance films. In particular, Chiron's relationship with his childhood friend shows the intricate ways people can love each other and hurt each other at the same time. Overall, the film is a heartbreaking but beautiful look at growing up, accepting oneself, and letting people into your life even as they change.

4 Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Although the romance genre includes many stereotypical stories, the best romance films go beyond what is expected. For example, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a French queer love story following Adèle Haenel as Héloïse and Noémie Merlant as Marianne. Set in the 18th century, Marianne is a painter commissioned to create a portrait of aristocrat Héloïse, and as the women get to know each other, they fall into a passionate love affair. Aside from being romantic and intimate, the film also tackles serious topics concerning women's rights. All in all, the film is moving even as it depicts a scenario that no longer occurs in the modern day.

3 Pride and Prejudice

It's likely that anyone who is a fan of romance has seen or at least heard of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In particular, the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie adapation starring Keira Knightley and Matthew McFayden continues to bewitch audiences even decades later. Pride and Prejudice is about the slow-burn love between Lizzie and Mr. Darcy. Although Mr. Darcy seems pompous and rude, Lizzie can't help but be intrigued by him and vice versa. With a lovely 19th-century setting that includes billowing white dresses and running through the rain, this film is undeniably romantic. Plus, its witty dialogue and amazing performances make it a great watch even for viewers not looking for romance.

2 Love Actually

Sometimes one romance isn't enough. A holiday classic, Love Actually is a film completely centered on romance and relationships. With a large, star-studded cast, the film follows a series of couples during the Christmas season who are all linked, though they don't realize it. Each romance in the film is different from the others and always subverts expectations. For those who have seen Love Actually, it is an automatic classic because of its hilarity and heartwarming qualities. Those who love romance most definitely need to see this film whether it's the holiday season or not.

1 When Harry Met Sally

Quirky, sweet, and plenty sarcastic, When Harry Met Sally is an iconic and beloved romance classic. Starting with a drive to New York after college graduation, Billy Crystal's Harry and Meg Ryan's Sally have an undeniable connection that can be translated as hatred or love. Over the years, the two continue to pass through each other's lives until it becomes natural that they become best friends and potentially something more. This film has its own particular ambiance that is funny, romantic, and grounded in real life. When Harry Met Sally still holds up today , especially for those who love Gilmore Girls, New York in autumn, and 1980s fashion.

Although there are endless romance movies existing in the media space, these films are definitely the best of the best. They combine real life with the sweetness of romance, offer unique and interesting characters, and give audiences the chance to experience different forms of love that range from pure happiness to bleak heartbreak. Even those who hate romance are sure to find at least one film on this list that will make their heart beat just a little bit faster.