Peter Ibbetson (1935) Semi-obscure and precious as a pearl, this woozy mid-Depression projectile is filmed like an old maid’s opium daydream, but the story is what makes your head spin: after being separated as children, Gary Cooper and Ann Harding meet again with a husband between them, and after he’s accidentally killed, Cooper’s unpretentious architect goes to prison for life – but as the couple ages, they literally meet, forever young, in their dreams. For decades. French critic Georges Sadoul wrote about this in his famous 1965 reference volume Dictionnaire du films, saying that "it is difficult to discuss this film without tending to invent certain details more than 25 years after being burnt by its flame." He didn’t invent much in his synopsis, but the flame is very real.

Wuthering Heights (1939) Whatever can be said about Wuthering Heights as a romantic experience fit for Valentine’s Day or any other day to kindle powerful emotions, it can’t possibly be enough. This is it, the seminally cosmic love story of all time, of Cathy and Heathcliff, of a yen so powerful it can transcend the grave and jealousy and fate. Samuel Goldwyn, director William Wyler and screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur worked up a Bronte reduction sauce, story-wise (the movie stops at chapter 16, which is fine, because the next generation never mattered anyway). But the combined natural forces of Merle Oberon (not a skilled actress, but a galvanic movie star), a young Laurence Olivier, the moors (actually Los Angeles County), and Bronte’s fierce storytelling make this a larger-than-life experience. Ignore the few stodgy details, and submerge into its self-destructive passions.

Ninotchka (1939) On the lighter side, this Ernst Lubitsch comedy is a bliss-out, a paean for Parisian mad love-&-fun, pitched by hedonistic American expat Melvyn Douglas to steely, humorless Soviet comrade Greta Garbo, who’s in town on a matter of state business (goofy Russian agents distracted by the Gallic pleasure principle). Of course, Garbo is masterful as the comically grim maiden in a gray suit, barely disguising a warm heart and yearning for love that we can always see beating beneath the Marxist-Leninist ideology. A little champagne, a little Paris skyline, a little woo from the rather satyric Douglas, and she opens like a lily (figuratively speaking, at least; this is 1939). It doesn’t hurt that Lubitsch had the subtlety and timing of a Hollywood Mozart, and Ninotchka’s screenplay, mostly by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, is one of the wittiest and gentlest of the entire Golden Age.

Casablanca (1942) Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco called it not "a movie," but The Movies, and yet that still doesn’t explain the deathless allure and hypnotic dramatic slam of this greatest Hollywood concoction, as much of a still vibrant myth system as it is a super-romantic wartime soap. Persistently popular for decades after its premiere, Casablanca ran the natural risk of becoming over-familiar, a storehouse of cliches and fabulous dialogue snippets that have, by now, found their way into the language without very many of us knowing where they came from ("I’m shocked, shocked..."). But, today, it rarely has occasion to show up on TV anymore, and Humphrey Bogart is no longer a teen-hip, counter-culture icon. Never mind: it’s still the quintessential mating dance between tough-guy cynicism and hearttugging love fable, between self-satisfaction and self-sacrifice, be it in the context of saving the world from Nazis or limning a love affair, or, as in this film, both. Which means it is not, like so many of today’s romances, strictly a "chick flick" – the sensibility at work here, primarily the voice of a remarkable screenplay written and rewritten a day at a time as the movie was being shot, acknowledges, caters to and converses with both genders. Bogart is virtually the 20^th century’s first definition of a man’s man: ugly and short, but indescribably charismatic and so cool he can run into his lost love (a daydream-inducing Ingrid Bergman), spar with Nazi officers, crack jokes and subtly reveal a lifetime of bitterness and desire, all at exactly the same time. Bergman, for her part, is both intelligent, gentle and fantastically desirable, the despairing hub around which the battle for the free world revolves. That’s what makes it ideal St. Valentine’s Day viewing – no one’s indulging anyone else, and yet everyone is focused on the tragic intercourse of love and history.

Lola (1960) New Wave romantic Jacques Demy takes to the streets of Nantes in his first café love tangle, in which Anouk Aimee is a luscious cabaret singer flitting above a messy but congenial web of lust and love, waiting for her true, idealized love to return to her.

Heaven Can Wait (1979) Warren Beatty’s remake of the pretty-swell Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) is a wonderfully lighthearted love story of an aging quarterback who is plucked up to heaven’s way-station before his time – and before his final Superbowl. Too late to go back among the living as his old self, he gets temporary custody of a millionaire’s body, becoming smitten with an Englishwoman (Julie Christie) in the bargain. Beatty and co-writer/director Buck Henry cut the sweetness with plenty of satire – and watch Charles Grodin’s every duplicitous move. Hardly a moment in the movie that isn’t a pleasure.

Shakespeare in Love (1998) A light-hearted and lovely tale of Shakespeare’s own unrequited love story, which proved the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet (and Twelfth Night), as light on its feet as the play is weighty with tragedy. The comic timing is impeccable, from a large and buoyant cast, and the lovable energy of the movie is embodied in Shakespeare himself (Joseph Fiennes), who never seems to sleep and is in constant athletic motion. The players deliver masses of Shakespearean dialogue, sometimes disguised, with complete conviction, wit and speed, and there’s enough heat between Fiennes and Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow to warm the home fires.

Serendipity (2001) John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet during a holiday shopping tug-of-war for a pair of cashmere gloves at Bloomingdale’s and then continue their flirting over the famous frozen hot chocolate at nearby Serendipity III, following up with skating in the snow at Wollman Rink. Is it fate? She thinks so, to an almost psychotic degree, and so decides to test it, and thus the movies carries on through several years and many monstrous dalliances with destiny, before the inevitable hook-up.

Before Sunset (2004) The setting is Paris, the archetypal hub of romance, and we rejoin Celine and Jesse nine years after they left each other at the train station, swearing to meet in Vienna six months later, in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. (Look for that in the "Dating" chapter of Flickipedia.) Clearly, we were supposed to wonder if they’d actually meet up – and, just as clearly, we weren’t supposed to know for sure either way. But this sequel, coming a decade later, with a decade’s wear and tear having accumulated on the actors and the characters, gives us a St. Valentine’s Day-style answer we had no right to expect. It’s both intelligent and sexy and whether you sigh dreamily over the notion of love at first sight or scorn it, the screenplay approaches it in such an original way you won’t have the heart to scoff: Celine and Jesse share humorous, off-beat musings on life while they meander around Paris in the late-afternoon sun the same way they wandered Vienna, but avoiding – and then not being able to avoid – the paths their lives have taken, because, no, they never reunited as they’d promised. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have invested so much in these characters that they share screenplay credit with director Richard Linklater; hard-bitten realists, the three of them are dogged about not letting anyone off the hook romantically-speaking, and yet the movie comes booby-trapped with the sneakiest happy ending ever, a slow dawning as Delpy sashays around her apartment, impersonating Nina Simone. Irresistible.