28 reviews in this category.
Charlie Harper is a sincere, modestly scaled romance that earns its emotional beats through committed performances rather than ideological posturing. Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean's film premiered at TIFF in 2025 and finally reached U.S.…...
The Love Hypothesis arrives with a built-in audience: the millions of readers who made Ali Hazelwood's debut novel a TikTok phenomenon.…...
The Australian rom-com hit created by real-life married couple Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall is warm, sincere, and committed to the idea that building a relationship matters.…...
Brokeback Mountain is the rare film that is both a landmark of progressive culture and a deeply traditional tragedy.…...
Joe Swanberg's The Sun Never Sets is a quiet, patient film about a young woman who retreats to a remote Alaskan town to escape a life that collapsed under its own weight.…...
Fireproof is not a good film in the conventional cinematic sense. The acting is uneven, the dialog is didactic, and the structure is functionally a sermon with characters. But grading Fireproof on cinematic merits misses the point entirely.…...
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is a masterpiece of psychological suspense that operates entirely outside modern ideological frameworks.…...
One Night Only is a Will Gluck romantic comedy built around a single high-concept hook: in this version of America, single people pay a bachelor tax, and one night a year the government forgives it.…...
Casablanca is the greatest film Hollywood ever made, not because it set out to be great but because everything that could go right did. The script was written day by day during production. Nobody knew how it would end until the final week of shooting.…...
Office Romance is a real romantic comedy. Not a deconstruction of one. Not a parody of one. Not a movie that uses the form to make a point about gender politics. A romantic comedy.…...
Girls Like Girls is exactly what it advertises itself to be. That is both its most honest quality and, for VirtueVigil readers, its most important characteristic to understand upfront....
Carolina Caroline (2026) has a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score from its limited release. With 17 critics counted as of this writing, that is not a large sample, but the unanimity is notable.…...
A Star Is Born is, first and last, a love story. Everything else, the music, the industry commentary, the feminist readings, the addiction narrative, runs through and around that core.…...
You, Me & Tuscany is a warm, formulaic romantic comedy that delivers exactly what its poster promises.…...
This is a tearjerker built around one of the most traditional premises in modern romance fiction: a mother fighting to know her child. It is not a politically complicated film. It is not interested in being provocative.…...
The Wedding Singer is the best Adam Sandler film. Not the funniest. Not the most ambitious. The best, because it is the one where his persona serves a story worth telling....
Bridgerton Season 4 is a Cinderella story set in a version of Regency England that has no memory of actual Regency England.…...
Daniel Craig gives the best performance of his career in a film that probably should not work as well as it does....
The professional critics never liked The Notebook. 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, 53 on Metacritic. 'Shameless manipulation,' one reviewer called it. 'A tearjerker with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.' The audience score is 86%.…...
Will Hunting is twenty years old, smarter than everyone in any room he has ever walked into, and entirely alone. He works as a janitor at MIT.…...
The original 1993 Wedding Banquet was a film about a gay man living a double life, caught between the love he had chosen and the family expectations he had not been able to refuse. It was genuinely moving because it took the parents seriously.…...
Celine Song's Past Lives is a film about what you give up when you choose to become someone. It is quiet, devastating, and almost defiantly apolitical in a cultural moment when apolitical means brave....
Anyone But You is the romantic comedy Hollywood forgot how to make. Not because it is especially brilliant, but because it is the simplest possible version of the thing it is trying to be: a film about two attractive people who are clearly meant for …...
Titanic holds a strange place in film history. It won eleven Academy Awards and $2.2 billion at the global box office in 1997. It made Leonardo DiCaprio a global superstar and Kate Winslet one of the defining actresses of her generation.…...
Pixar's Elemental arrived at the box office to an unexpectedly rocky opening weekend and then quietly became one of the most audience-beloved films of 2023. The critics gave it a middling 74%. The audiences gave it a 95%. That gap is not accidental.…...
People We Meet on Vacation is the rom-com BookTok has been waiting for, and it delivers exactly what that audience wants: two impossibly attractive leads with crackling chemistry, beautiful international locations, a will-they-won't-they structure th…...
We Live in Time is a weepie. An exceptionally well-made one, built on two of the finest performances in recent romantic cinema. It will make you cry. Whether it should is a more interesting question....
It Ends with Us arrives as two films at war with each other, and the battle behind the camera turned out to be far more interesting than what ended up on screen....
