The Age of Innocence (1993)

A 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 a dinner party like a gangland ambush, and Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer make a glove being unbuttoned feel more charged than most love scenes. The final stretch jumps ahead to Newland at fifty-seven, on a bench in Paris, and that coda is why it belongs here: it shows exactly what a lifetime of restraint costs. Choose it if you like longing more than kissing.