Items22The creator’s order
  1. 1Gone with the Wind (1939)Gone with the Wind (1939) 8.2/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 15, 1939The template for the whole genre: a romance stretched across the Civil War and Reconstruction, where Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler spend years circling, marrying the wrong people and finally colliding at the worst possible moment. Vivien Leigh plays Scarlett as a survivor first and a lover…0
  2. 2Doctor Zhivago (1965)Doctor Zhivago (1965) 7.9/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 22, 1965David Lean lets history keep pulling Yuri Zhivago and Lara apart. World War I and the October Revolution decide when they can meet, and the film is built around how rare and precious those stretches are. Omar Sharif plays Zhivago as a watcher swept along by events, while Julie Christie gives Lara…0
  3. 3The Way We Were (1973)The Way We Were (1973) 7.0/10 on IMDbReleased Oct 17, 1973Katie Morosky is a political firebrand, Hubbell Gardiner is a golden boy who never has to try, and Sydney Pollack follows them from their college days through World War II and into the Hollywood blacklist era. The romance is real, but the film is honest that love does not dissolve a basic…0
  4. 4Same Time, Next Year (1978)Same Time, Next Year (1978) 7.2/10 on IMDbReleased Apr 23, 1978The cleverest structure on the list. George and Doris, each married to someone else, meet at a romantic inn and agree to come back on the same weekend every year, and the film drops in on that one room again and again as the years pass outside it. Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn carry nearly the whole…0
  5. 5Out of Africa (1985)Out of Africa (1985) 7.2/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 20, 1985Based on Karen Blixen's own account of her years in Kenya, Sydney Pollack's film is a romance about two people who refuse to belong to anyone. Meryl Streep's Karen arrives in Africa early in the 20th century in a marriage of convenience, and her bond with Robert Redford's hunter Denys Finch Hatton…0
  6. 6When Harry Met Sally... (1989)When Harry Met Sally... (1989) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 12, 1989Proof that a romance can cover years without a war in sight. Harry and Sally meet on a drive to New York after college, dislike each other, and keep running into each other as their lives change, until a friendship forms that neither of them planned. Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron let the gaps…0
  7. 7The Age of Innocence (1993)The Age of Innocence (1993) 7.2/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 10, 1993A romance that spans decades almost entirely through what never happens. In 1870s New York, the lawyer Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland when her cousin, the separated Countess Ellen Olenska, returns to town, and the rules of their class close around all three of them. Martin Scorsese films…0
  8. 8Legends of the Fall (1994)Legends of the Fall (1994) 7.5/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 23, 1994Pure, unembarrassed melodrama, and the most windswept film here. Edward Zwick follows the Ludlow brothers on their father's Montana ranch across several decades of the early 20th century, with a world war, a rivalry soured by jealousy and Julia Ormond's Susannah, whose love for the restless Tristan…0
  9. 9Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996)Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 2, 1996The essential pick for anyone who has only seen the Hollywood epics. Peter Chan follows two migrants from mainland China, played by Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung, who meet in Hong Kong, become friends, fall for each other and keep missing their moment as work, money and other commitments pull them…0
  10. 10The English Patient (1996)The English Patient (1996) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 14, 1996Two timelines, one obsession. In the late 1930s, the Hungarian mapmaker Almásy charts the Sahara and falls for Katharine Clifton, the wife of a man flying for his expedition; as World War II ends, a badly burned patient in an Italian monastery is nursed by Juliette Binoche's Hana while that story…0