صاحب‌خبر - The gazebo confession in The Sound of Music Who among us didn’t fall for Captain Von Trapp from the moment he sang Eidelweiss? Maria, on the verge of flunking out of nun school, didn’t stand a chance. The PG sexual tension then becomes unbearable during a ländler; the captain can’t take his eyes off Maria, forcing her to blush so hard that she legs it back to the abbey. But after the reverend mother talks sense into her (choose the captain, not God, duh!) the pair reunite and finally confess their love in a gazebo, before singing in the moonlight: “Here you are standing there loving me, whether or not you should”. Not even the revelation that the actors were told off for laughing so much during filming can dim the romance – it only adds to the adolescent thrill of it all. And the one tiny, goose-pimply moment that tops it off is Von Trapp whispering: “Oh, my love.” Hollie Richardson Bad timing in Casablanca View image in fullscreen Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Photograph: Warner Bros./Kobal/REX/Shutterstock It’s 1940 and Paris is falling to the Nazis, watched from a high window by Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, who, with devil-may-care defiance, drink champagne and crack wise about their “bad timing” in choosing now to fall in love. What was Ilsa doing 10 years ago, Rick wonders. Ilsa says she was getting braces fitted for her teeth and asks him the same question. Rick answers with a reticent, manly smile, as if amused by a memory that would never otherwise be dredged up: “Looking for a job …” Apart from anything else, this is a great age-gap romance (Humphrey Bogart is 43; Ingrid Bergman, 28) and the film alludes, perhaps daringly, to the fact that Rick was an adult during the Depression, while Ilsa was a schoolgirl (he does, after all, call her “kid”). While she was sublimely innocent of life’s cares, Rick was worried about money. Perhaps even now, he does not care to tell Ilsa exactly what he was doing when she was getting her braces fitted. There is such gorgeous, protective romantic gallantry in this moment. Peter Bradshaw The photograph at the end of Titanic Typically, when I tell people that Titanic always makes me cry, they assume I mean the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio sinks into the abyss. Incorrect. That scene is just fine. What really gets me is the very end of the movie, when the camera pans over elderly Rose’s photos as she sleeps (or dies). This woman lived a full life – married, had kids, rode on horseback, travelled the world – yet in her final moments, what she remembers is a brief, long-ago affair with a man who never got to age. That, at the age of 101, Rose DeWitt Bukater would still think about her two torrid days with Jack Dawson – that your love could burn so intensely you feel it for the rest of your life; that his face could be so beautiful it haunts your final hours – was a cataclysmic revelation to my 12-year-old self. And it remains James Cameron’s most convincing fantasy, an insanely romantic notion that, despite all my lived experience, reason, equanimity and general distaste for mushiness, still hits. Adrian Horton Awkward listening in Before Sunrise A boy and a girl step into a listening booth. They don’t know the record shop or the city; they barely even know each other. Director Richard Linklater decided not to play his actors the track – Come Here, by Kath Bloom – before filming and you can see Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy suppressing smiles when the vocal kicks in, tempted to deflect the song’s raw emotion by cynically laughing it off. The awkwardness builds. We assume that a fumbling kiss must be coming. But it is the song that’s the kiss. It moves them and blesses them and allows them to stroll on through the city and have another kiss somewhere else. Xan Brooks An orphaned lamb in God’s Own Country Playing out in the harsh setting of a Yorkshire farm, God’s Own Country is about a young man, Johnny (Josh O’Connor) whose family life, though rooted in love, is as jagged and inhospitable as the landscape. Then Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian, turns up to help with lambing. Unlike the Saxby family, Gheorghe has a softness to him, and a kindness. In one scene, Gheorghe dresses an orphaned lamb in the skin of another that has just died, so that the tiny creature is accepted, and suckled, by a new mother. It is the film’s turning point: the moment when Johnny begins to learn the meaning of gentleness, tenderness and love. Charlotte Higgins Eyes lock over La Vie en Rose in A Star Is Born The first meeting between Ally (Lady Gaga) and Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) – if you can call it that – is so heady, so beguiling, that it makes A Star Is Born’s inevitable slide into tragedy even more devastating. At the film’s core is the idea that true love allows you to see someone’s true self, without any of the baggage that comes from fame or money or addiction – and that great art might be a way to communicate that truth to the wider world. Watching Jackson go from scepticism to adoration to love at first sight in the course of one song feels like the apotheosis of that idea. Shaad D’Souza A damp proposal in Pride and Prejudice It’s hardly a picture of an aspirational romance. He’s just a boy, standing in front of a girl, telling her that in spite of his better judgment and her lower social class, he loves her “most ardently”. A roiling argument understandably ensues. Though what gives the scene, from Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, a sense of romantic drama is composer Dario Marianelli’s racing score, the pounding rain, the lush greenery and, most importantly, the burning chemistry between Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet and Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr Darcy. Between trading barbs thick with sexual tension (Elizabeth: “your arrogance and conceit, your selfish disdain”) the rain-drenched protagonists draw closer and closer until they are inches away from a kiss. When Darcy pauses and walks away, Elizabeth’s face says it all: love can be very confusing. Rebecca Liu The press conference in Roman Holiday In just a few minutes, during which only coded formalities are spoken, Crown Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) clocks that one of the reporters lined up before her (Gregory Peck) is the man with whom she has been secretly carousing around Rome; he indicates that he is not going to betray her; and both of them acknowledge that despite the depth of their feelings, this is where they must leave it – although he can’t help but look back towards the empty stage when everyone else has gone. Never have discretion, restraint, dignity, realism and the sadness of a road that cannot be taken seemed so romantic. Chris Tryhorn A pregnancy test in If These Walls Could Talk 2 The three parts of this little-seen 2000 film are each set in the same house in different time periods; all three sets of inhabitants are lesbians. In the final section, set in what would have been the present day when the film was released, a couple played by Sharon Stone and Ellen DeGeneres are trying for a baby with a sperm donor. It ends with a wonderful scene in which Stone’s character has found out she is pregnant and the pair dance around the bathroom in their slippers to Natalie Cole’s This Will Be. It may not be anything like your classic fairytale ending – there’s no grand gesture, no heartfelt speech, and obviously no Prince Charming – but it shows a private, joyful moment between two people who have been loving each other for a long time. Lucy Knight Silence in the diner in The Bourne Ultimatum Economy is the key to romance in the movies. Here, we see two people, shot in alternating over-the-shoulder closeups. After some exposition, Bourne asks what we’ve all been thinking: why do you keep popping up in his movies? Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) takes a beat, puts down her coffee cup. “It was difficult … for me. With you.” They look at each other, Nicky searching his face for clues, Bourne granite-faced. The silence stretches, uncomfortably (actually, 15 seconds). We’re also looking at their faces for clues. “You really don’t remember anything?” “No.” Two cops walk in. “We need to go.” And … back to the Bourney stuff. But it’s all there, in that 40-odd seconds, for viewers to divine for themselves. Jason Deans A last-gasp declaration in A Matter of Life and Death Falling in love as you believe you’re about to die? Opening scenes don’t get more operatically romantic. It’s the second world war, and Royal Air Force pilot Peter Carter (David Niven), his plane badly damaged, is signing off from this mortal realm to radio operator June (Kim Hunter). Quoting Walter Raleigh and poet Andrew Marvell (“What a marvel!”), Niven makes Carter the quintessential dashing Brit, his stiff upper lip softened by a smile. He asks June if she’s pretty: “Not bad,” she replies sorrowfully, a sublime comic moment from Hunter that tempers the whole scene. The film began production in the same week the war ended, and the whole thing is charged with love for existence itself: “I love you, June, you’re life and I’m leaving you,” as Carter says so magnificently. Ben Beaumont-Thomas The mushroom omelette in Phantom Thread Grand romantic gestures are not part of most people’s lives, the quotidian reality of being and putting up with someone barely recognisable from the fantasy offered up on screen. But Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnum opus Phantom Thread shows us an epic act of love that’s both absurdly perverse and immediately relatable. It’s the moment when, putting two and two – and mushrooms – together, Daniel Day-Lewis’s petulant egotist knowingly eats the poisoned omelette made by Vicky Krieps’s exasperated bride. It’s about so much – relinquishing control, understanding balance, embracing change, a dom allowing another dom to play sub – and it’s easily the most romantic movie moment to precede a hellish, fight-for-your-life day on the loo. Benjamin Lee Sally Hawkins’ declaration in Spencer View image in fullscreen Sally Hawkins and Kristen Stewart in Spencer. Photograph: YouTube While there are myriad possible inspirations for Maggie, Diana’s royal dresser in Pablo Larraín’s biopic, there is no evidence of queer romance or close adoration in Diana’s own life. But when Maggie, played by Sally Hawkins, tells Kristen Stewart’s Diana, “I’m in love with you. Yes, I mean in that way. Completely,” you feel comforted that this woman who is so tormented by the expectation of performance in a loveless marriage finds some genuine kinship, even if it’s not totally returned in that way, and even if it is fiction. The royal family want to subject Diana to treatment for her illness, to which Maggie says, “Fuck doctors, what you need is love. Love, shocks and laughter.” The two run around on the beach, Diana finally knowing love and freedom, before departing – implicitly for ever. Jason Okundaye A heroin-hallucinated kiss in Sid & Nancy Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb) are slumped in bed in a smack-induced stupor. “Just gimme a kiss,” slurs Sid. Cut to a wide-shot of the pair in a smoky, steely-blue New York alleyway, snogging against a dumpster as rubbish falls from the sky in slow motion; the woozy score mounts and spirals, a synthesised ticking sound seeming to warn the pair that time is running out. There is nothing romantic about where the film is heading, and its director Alex Cox rightly regrets the “bogus” ending, in which the dead lovers take a yellow taxi cab to the afterlife. (“We should have shown Sid dying in a pool of vomit,” Cox said.) But that only makes this fleeting hallucinated kiss, mournfully photographed by Roger Deakins, all the more precious. Ryan Gilbey The will-they-won’t-they close of The Lunchbox This Mumbai-set romance is a film of exquisite poignancy and restraint in which – spoiler alert – the couple don’t even meet. They connect via a mixup over a misdelivered lunchbox and communicate via chaste letters. A meeting is arranged, but the lonely Saajan (Irrfan Khan) steps back, doubting himself, unable to take the decisive step that will return him to life. The final scene always has me holding my breath. Ila (a luminous Nimrat Kaur) has finally resolved to leave her neglectful and unfaithful husband. She sells her wedding jewellery and writes – in her head – a final letter to Saajan as she prepares to catch a train for Bhutan, where happiness is valued higher than money. Or is that just a dream? Is something far darker planned? But Saajan has at last found his own courage and, squatting in the train carriage amid the singing dabbawalas who can lead him to the owner of the lunchbox, is making his way to Ila, his soulmate. Will they connect or will he arrive too late? The ending is left open. I can think of no other film in which I yearn quite so ardently for the two to live happily ever after. Imogen Tilden The final-reel revelation in You’ve Got Mail The final scene of Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail is one of the most spellbinding in romcom history. Bookstore owners Joe (Tom Hanks) and Kathleen (Meg Ryan) fall in love as anonymous strangers on the internet, back when we all had dial-up modems and tinder was used to light a fire. When Joe learns Kathleen is actually the woman he put out of business, he works to win her over through friendship – and succeeds. I’ve never not cried at the climax, when Joe walks round the park with his adorable pup Brinkley and Kathleen tears up because she’s happy it’s him. “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly,” she says, as he wipes the tear from her cheek and says, “Don’t cry, shopgirl”. Yes, some of it is dated, but the message stands: true love transcends all else. Nadia Khomami A birthday surprise in Betty Blue A hapless handyman and a volatile woman are motoring through rural France in a magnificent yellow Mercedes. It is the golden hour before sunset – the clock is stuck on this hour in Betty Blue – and they’ve run out of road. Penniless, aspiring writer Zorg reveals that, somehow, he’s bought this land for Betty. He pops the Mercedes’ boot to reveal her birthday cake, candles ablaze. They embrace and the cake goes flying. They are fantasists and dreamers. Betty is 20, my age when I watched this film, where every scene shimmers with colour and passion. It is probably unacceptable to enjoy Betty Blue today. Unless you’re 20, in which case you’re allowed to love this indulgent, doomed true romance. Patrick Barkham Someone else’s diary in The English Patient View image in fullscreen Fiennes and Scott Thomas in the film. Photograph: Cinetext/Miramax/Allstar “Am I K, in your book? I think I must be.” It’s still impossible to figure out why this moment in The English Patient is so touching. To recap: Ralph Fiennes is quite hot, I guess, but also quite a difficult individual – even (spoiler) before he gets burned to a cinder. Taciturn, complicated; he’s not lousy with friends, put it that way. Kristin Scott Thomas is just staggeringly beautiful in this film, but female actors often are, to no noticeable emotional effect. They’ve been stuck in a moment of high jeopardy, a sandstorm; she’s found his diary, he adores everything about her. She could let it lie. He definitely wouldn’t have pushed it (see taciturn, above). She essentially seals her own fate, unleashes everything, by asking – in the very question, she declares her own feelings. But so discreetly! Zoe Williams The kiss of life in The Matrix The Wachowskis’ epic paranoia fable is about many things: human batteries, downloading things into your brain and how to wear awesome leather overcoats – but at its heart it’s an amazingly powerful love story, without which none of the other crud about computer simulations and sentient programs would have a fraction of their impact. Yes, the film is about the search for The One, but it’s also about the search for “the one” (which means that, bear with me here, Trinity is actually the film’s protagonist, not Neo). Part of the not inconsiderable brilliance of this film is the way it all ties together in the climactic clinch. Picture the scene: inside the Matrix, the agents have just filled Neo full of lead; aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, real-world Keanu, in his fetching suedehead and grey rags, is dead on the table, and Trinity gives it everything with her life-restoring smooch. (She does spoil the effect slightly, true, by barking “Now get up!” in a drill sergeant’s voice straight after.) It’s the messianic resurrection of the dead Neo, the moment of face-exploding victory, and of course a heart-rending piece of human-on-human intimacy as marauding metal jellyfish try to rip everyone to shreds. As a distillation of the power of love it could hardly be bettered. Andrew Pulver A Mills & Boon moment in Bram Stoker’s Dracula “I have crossed oceans of time to find you.” In a movie devoted to the complications of Francis Ford Coppola’s libido, the cinematograph scene is the one unabashed, Mills & Boon, full-swoon moment. Gary Oldman’s hip Transylvanian gunslinger catches up with Winona Ryder’s Mina in London, introducing himself with a touch of Borat: “Do not fear me.” About to take what he wants, but confronted with her innocence, he suffers a case of canine erectile dysfunction, and they wind up petting a giant escaped albino wolf. Coppola is unable to still his beating art: the vampire gliding his would-be lover backwards through the sumptuous period sets; the Slavic lashings of Wojciech Kilar’s score drenching them; and the undead marvels of the cinematograph all around, revealing the director’s true infatuation. Phil Hoad The first meeting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind In a film full of moments that capture the messy, intractable nature of romantic love, it’s the scene where Kate Winslet’s Clementine and Jim Carrey’s Joel first meet that never fails to seal the deal. With its non-chronological structure (crucial to the premise of Joel recalling the couple’s relationship as he undergoes a procedure to delete Clementine from his memory), the boy-meets-girl moment occurs at the end of the film, just before the erasure process is complete and he will, supposedly forever, forget that his ex existed. The setting is fittingly devoid of glamour: they are sitting on steps at a windy beach in Montauk, she wearing her signature bright orange hoodie, he eating a plate of picnic food. But then come the glimpses of an affinity that will grow so strong that even memory erasure cannot break it. She takes food off his plate without his permission (“It was so intimate, like we were already lovers”, Joel recalls). He tells her with heart-searing restraint: “I think your name is magical.”It’s all so very apposite to the film’s fundamental message that love can be, at its best, the ordinary, the incidental, even the mundane. Devika Bhat A kiss by a BMW in Pretty in Pink It was the kiss at the end that did it. Girl meets boy, falls out with boy, but romance and hormones conquer all, leading to a very passionate congress in a car park, as the credits roll to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. I’m talking about the final scene in Pretty in Pink, a film that struck a nerve. It still does, for some unfathomable reason. Rich boy Blane (Andrew McCarthy) was nothing like teenage me. And kooky girl Andie (Molly Ringwald) was nothing like any of the girls I knew back then. In truth, there weren’t that many of them, if any. Still, she seemed bewitchingly beautiful and he was a total dork. And they ended up together! Now I remember why I liked it so much. Nick Hopkins Seeing each other in Portrait of a Lady on Fire View image in fullscreen Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy The romance of Portrait of a Lady On Fire is as beautiful as it is unsentimental. Marianne, an artist, has been painting Héloïse without her knowledge. But when Héloïse eventually finds out and agrees to sit for the portrait, around halfway through the film, she carefully reveals that she, too, has been secretly observing Marianne. As they exchange notes on each other’s barely perceptible habits, their imbalances of power, social and economic, are levelled out. The situation may have been transactional at the start, but in this moment they become equals. They don’t kiss, yet, but acknowledge their desire by really seeing each other. Gorgeous. Rebecca Nicholson The start of Up Up begins with old-man protagonist Carl as a young kid, meeting his soulmate Ellie. They’re both obsessed with adventure, and he promises to take her on their own one day. The swelling music of the ensuing montage has a Pavlovian power over my tear ducts now, scoring the most exquisite, tragic romance to ever (nonsensically) open a kids’ film. There’s a marriage, a house, a nursery – and then a calamitous visit to the fertility doctor. Afterwards, Carl spots Ellie sitting in their garden, her devastated eyes closed to the sun. He joins her out there to remind her of that other adventure he promised. Accidents will thwart that dream too, but life goes on – and now they are grey and laughing and slow-dancing in the living room. I won’t spoil what happens next, but it has eclipsed the rest of the plot for me. Something about robot dogs who talk? Who cares. I’m scrolling back to the start. Steph Harmon Sharing a laugh at a boring party in The Age of Innocence There are plenty of scenes in cinema of men falling for women based on their looks, and you’d have to be a fool not to see that looking like Michelle Pfeiffer certainly helps in that department. But what makes this scene from The Age of Innocence so magical is the giddy way that Daniel Day-Lewis giggles at her mischievous perspective on polite New York society, showing us that repressed straight arrow Newland Archer is attracted – almost against his will – by the countess Ellen’s sense of humour. She’s witty, perceptive and irreverent, which he finds magnetic, and he’s startled by that, as if he’s never met a woman who made him properly laugh before – which given his respectable life among predictable people, he probably hasn’t. Catherine Bray The end of Carol When I learned Todd Haynes was adapting Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, my first thought was: “I hope he doesn’t change the ending” – a rare happy one for a lesbian couple in a novel published in 1951. Therese realises she must be with Carol and rushes out of a party to find her in a restaurant, thinking: “It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.” But Haynes captures these breathless final pages so perfectly, Carter Burwell’s rich score swelling as Therese (Rooney Mara) spots the statuesque Carol (Cate Blanchett) and walks towards her. No words are needed; you can feel the weight of everything they have been through over the last two hours, how far we have come in regards to same-sex love over the last century. The moment they lock eyes makes me cry every time. Sian Cain Cooking in Moonlight View image in fullscreen Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland in Moonlight. Photograph: David Bornfriend/Plan B Entertainment/Allstar Romcoms are forever telling us that the height of romance is a big gesture: an airport run; a limo; a boombox. But those big demonstrations are for the film, not the beloved. In Moonlight, that act of love is a small one: Kevin cooks a meal for Chiron. But that dish could not be freighted with more meaning, hence why the griddled meat, clumsily moulded rice and smattering of herbs take on such a heartstopping quality, in Barry Jenkins’s intimate direction of the glowing last act. Here at last is the tenderness Chiron has always needed; here, at last, is love. Caspar Salmon A healing touch in WALL-E We’ve all been out of love, but few longer than when WALL-E the Waste Allocation Load Lifter robot finds himself stranded for 700 years on an otherwise deserted futuristic planet Earth. When Eve the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator arrives to scan the planet for sustainable life, WALL-E falls in love and does everything any self-respecting single robot would do – desperately tidying up his embarrassingly messy bachelor pad, and wooing Eve with the first sprouting plant on Earth for 700 years. If you don’t have a tear in your eye when Eve restores the broken WALL-E’s personality by holding hands and giving him a kiss to Michael Crawford’s It Only Takes A Moment from Hello Dolly, you’re simply not human. Rich Pelley The poppyfield kiss in A Room with a View Hard to overstate the contrast between grey central London in 1986 and the golden, creamy world of Ivory and Merchant. I’d bunked off school to go and see A Room with A View, and from the very first moment I was pulled through the magic portal. When Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) – a bit grumpy and moody, prickly, wooden and wonderful – stepped through a Florentine meadow full of sunshine to be passionately kissed by George Emerson, I felt as if I would explode, and for days afterwards I was vibrating with excitement. A 14-year-old full of longing and dreams, waiting for her life to start and hoping it would all be just like this. Bibi van der Zee Cycling in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid There is something exhilarating about the impossibly gorgeous Katherine Ross riding on the handlebars of the impossibly gorgeous Paul Newman as they lark about before heading to the wilds of Bolivia. The fun bike stunts (mostly done by Newman himself), interspersed with dazzling smiles and streaming sunlight, come with a brief sense of freedom, before Butch and Sundance must go on the run. The sweetness is cut through with a sense of what can never be – not least because Ross is actually the girlfriend of Newman’s partner in crime, played by Robert Redford. Music is key. The gentle melody of Burt Bacharach’s Raindrops morphs into jaunty vaudeville music as Newman shows off madly, before crashing backwards into a fence. The kiss he blows to the bull is just fabulous. Purists might say the scene doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. But it’s gloriously romantic never the less. Clare Margetson Buns and lung disease in Brief Encounter Brief Encounter is usually described as a weepie. It’s easy to forget how queasy it is, too. Noël Coward and David Lean’s film is totally vertiginous; it snatches the breath as though you were teetering on the platform edge as the express train screams past. Even its most doe-eyed moment makes you feel a bit sick. After their first jolly, innocent-ish, accidental afternoon together, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard have tea and buns in the station cafe before their trains. He starts evangelising about preventative medicine for pneumoconiosis and, very suddenly, she realises she’s in love with him. And he knows. And it’s mutual. Everything changes in a silent, polite split-second of horrific electricity. And then the awful, glorious fall. Catherine Shoard∎​