Stephanie Zacharek

In this semiautobiographical meditation on the fickle nature of creative genius, Federico Fellini opens his arms wide to the enigmas of childhood, religion, art, sex, and love—mysteries with no solution.

In David Lean’s Venice-set romance, a fleeting love affair prompts a woman’s self-exploration.

Two lovers cross boundaries both personal and national in this ambitious, zigzagging love story, one of the most romantic films of this century.

A work of rapturous energy, John Cameron Mitchell’s beloved debut feature is a freewheeling rock-and-roll musical suffused with heartbreak and pleasure.

Claire Denis and Juliette Binoche grapple with the realities of middle-aged loneliness and the eternal quest for companionship in this candid quasi comedy.

A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

This underappreciated highlight of Michael Curtiz’s filmography grapples with postwar disillusionment and marital strife through the prism of a daylight noir.

George Stevens’s Oscar-winning comedy captures the first sparks of attraction that ignited one of the great on- and offscreen romances in Hollywood history.

Money can’t buy love and happiness in Preston Sturges’s classic comedy—or can it?