Romance Videos
Romantic movies and videos.
True Romance
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True Romance
It was directed with energetic skill by Top Gun Tony Scott, but this breathtaking 1993 thriller (think of it as an adolescent crime fantasy on steroids) has Quentin Tarantino written all over it. True Romance is really part of a loose trilogy that includes Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, with a crackling Tarantino screenplay that rides a fine line between raucous comedy and violent excess. Christian Slater plays Clarence, the comic-book lover who meets a beguiling prostitute named Alabama (Patricia Arquette), confronts her vicious pimp (Gary Oldman), and embarks on a cross-country odyssey with $5 million worth of Mafia cocaine. Mayhem ensues, culminating in a favorite Tarantino climax--the "Mexican standoff"--in which a roomful of guys are pointing guns at each other, waiting to see who shoots first. Brutal, profane, and totally outrageous, True Romance is not for everyone, but with a supporting cast that includes Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Brad Pitt, and Val Kilmer (as the ghost of Elvis!), you can be sure this movie will never be boring. --Jeff Shannon
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Little Romance (P&S)
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Little Romance (P&S)
Sandwiched between Slap Shot and The World According to Garp, George Roy Hill made this effervescent film about first love. A sharp American girl (Diane Lane, in her debut) and a film-loving Parisian boy (Thelonious Bernard, in his only film) fall innocently in love. When the girl's zealous mother (Sally Kellerman) goes ballistic, the young couple fall under the spell of a curious gentleman (none other than Laurence Olivier), who plants the seed to make their love last forever: to kiss under a Venetian bridge at sunset. As the love story becomes an adventure with the young lovers crossing France and Italy, Allan Burns's Oscar-nominated script and Hill's deft touch turn this into a romance for the ages and a movie to smile about. George Delerue's Oscar-winning score and the picturesque European scenery don't hurt either. Ages 7 and older. --Doug Thomas
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Modern Romance (1981) / Movie
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Modern Romance (1981) / Movie
It's just your typical boy-dumps-girl, boy-has-change-of-heart, boy-alienates-girl-anew love story. This romantic comedy, the last word on obsessive, can't-live-with-'em, can't-live-without-'em relationships, holds a special place in the hearts of Albert Brooks fans. Brooks stars as film editor Robert Cole, who breaks up--again, apparently--with Mary (Kathryn Harrold). They are in a no-win situation, he tells her, like Vietnam. The sequence that follows is an excruciating, intimately observed tour de force: Robert's long night's journey into day. Miserable, spaced out on Quaaludes, he stumbles around his apartment, admiring his record collection ("I love my albums"), rifling through his Rolodex, making a blind date call he will instantly regret. He becomes determined to win Mary back, but again falls prey to his possessiveness and paranoia, as when he happens to find Mary's phone bill and becomes obsessed over a long-distance number. Modern Romance is characteristically deadpan in its depiction of one man behaving badly. The dialogue is vintage Brooks, as when he tells a colleague (Bruno Kirby) that he and Mary always enjoyed great sex but could never really talk. "Do you need to talk?" his friend asks, which would be the topper in anyone else's comedy. But Brooks dismisses this cheap joke with, "We're men. Can we have a bond?" A hilarious subplot concerns Robert's work on a cheesy science fiction film that stars George Kennedy. James L. Brooks (no relation), who would direct Brooks to an Oscar nomination in Broadcast News, is hysterical as the deluded director who resists Robert's best, painstaking efforts to improve the film. For some, Modern Romance is a comedy, for others, a horror film (Robert is as relentless as Michael Myers and as much a nightmare as Freddy). See it and squirm with someone you love. --Donald Liebenson
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A Fine Romance (Episodes 1-9)
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A Fine Romance (Episodes 1-9)
As the Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields standard goes, this is A Fine Romance, a smart and low-key 1981 British series starring Oscar-winning Judi Dench and her real-life husband, Michael Williams, as a mismatched couple. This three-volume boxed set contains the first nine episodes, in which a comedy of errors keeps linguist Laura (currently translating a German textbook on urinary infections) and struggling landscape gardener Michael from hooking up romantically. It is, to again quote the song, a fine romance with no kisses (at least not until episode 6). Like Glenda Jackson, Dench excels at portraying prickly women of fierce intelligence who possess a quick wit and a sharp tongue, and who do not suffer fools. "I don't have any small talk," she complains to her matchmaking sister at a party. "Or any medium talk." Williams has a rumpled Dudley Moore quality as sad-sack Michael, "the odd single chap for the odd single girl." He is, as one character notes, "second division": quiet, nervous, short, and shy. His desperate attempts to find common ground with Laura--witness their ill-fated excursion to an ethnic mask museum exhibit in episode 2--make up much of the humor of these initial episodes. As one observer notes, "I like you two; you're odd." It is a pleasure to watch Laura and Michael's "mutual apathy" blossom into, well, you know the song. --Donald Liebenson
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