Directed by David Lean • 1949 • United Kingdom
Starring Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, Claude Rains

Four years after David Lean crafted what may be the screen’s most piercing examination of extramarital romance with BRIEF ENCOUNTER, he returned to a similar subject in this exquisite tale of a woman to...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s stunningly photographed comedy, romance flourishes in an unlikely place—the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstr...

Directed by James Ivory • 1986 • United Kingdom
Starring Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis

Merchant Ivory Productions, led by director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, became a household name with A ROOM WITH A VIEW, the first of their extraordinary adaptations of E. ...

Criterion Collection Edition #973

Directed by Gillian Armstrong • 1979 • Australia
Starring Judy Davis, Sam Neill

For her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-ag...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2010 • Italy
Starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami travels to Tuscany for a luminous and provocative romance in which nothing is as it appears. What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people—played by...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. A ...

Directed by Jean Vigo • 1934 • France
Starring Jean Dasté, Dita Parlo, Michel Simon

In Jean Vigo’s hands, an unassuming tale of conjugal love becomes an achingly romantic reverie of desire and hope. Jean (Jean Dasté), a barge captain, marries Juliette (Dita Parlo), an innocent country girl, and ...

Directed by Frank Borzage • 1937 • United States

Suffused with intoxicating romanticism, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT is a sublime paean to love from Frank Borzage, classic Hollywood’s supreme poet of carnal and spiritual desire. On the run through Europe from her wealthy, cruelly possessive husband...