Romance
If your love for love films can sometimes fade, for want of something fresh or a deeper insight, OVID can promise you original, distinctive returns to beauty, passion, the forbidden, mad misunderstandings, and stolen intimacies.
From Jaqueline’s Audry’s great (and recently rediscovered and restored) 1950 French boarding school drama OLIVIA, to Deny Arcand’s 1986 Academy-Award nominated hit THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, up to the high school rom-com LOL (Laughing Out Loud), starring Sophie Marceau, and including the worlds of surrogacy, prostitution, LBGTQ lives, and many others, here’s to love, in all its forms!
-
Swept Away
Directed by Lina Wertmüller • Drama • With Mariangela Melato, Giancarlo Giannini • 1974 • 115 minutes
NEW RESTORATION! Set against the backdrop of the beautiful Mediterranean, Swept Away is Lina Wertmuller's most famous and controversial film about sex, love and politics. On an elegant yacht cr...
-
The Seduction of Mimi
Directed by Lina Wertmüller • Drama • With Mariangela Melato, Agostina Belli, Giancarlo Giannini • 1972 • 112 minutes
THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI is a raucous sex comedy that brought international fame to director Lina Wertmuller (Swept Away).
Giancarlo Giannini (Love and Anarchy) gives a wonderfull...
-
Beauty in Trouble
Directed by Jan Hrebejk • Drama • With Anna Geislerová, Josef Abrhám, Jana Brejchová • 2006 • 110 minutes
Beauty in Trouble explores a young woman’s romantic dilemma: torn between a primal connection and the need to provide for her children, she loves two men. Set against the back drop of the ...
-
Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
Directed by Lili Horvát • Drama • With Natasa Stork, Viktor Bodó • 2021 • 94 minutes
After 20 years in the United States, a Hungarian neurosurgeon returns to Budapest for a romantic rendezvous with a fellow doctor she met at a conference. When the love of her life is nowhere to be seen, she trac...
-
Elles
Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska • Drama • With Juliette Binoche, Anaïs Demoustier, Joanna Kulig • 2011 • 99 minutes
A provocative and raw exploration of female sexuality, director Malgoska Szumowska's ELLES paints an unromantic picture of upper-crust domesticity refracted through the vibrant e...
-
Shall We Kiss?
Directed by Emmanuel Mouret • Drama • With Virginie Ledoyen, Emmanuel Mouret, Julie Gayet • 2009 • 102 minutes
When Gabriel and Emilie meet by chance, he offers her a ride, and they spend the evening talking, laughing and getting along famously. At the end of the night, Emilie declines Gabriel’s...
-
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Directed by Marc Allégret • Drama • With Danielle Darrieux, Leo Genn, Erno Crisa, Jean Murat • 1955 • 100 minutes
This is the first film of D.H. Lawrence’s controversial novel, which premiered in 1955, five years before the uncensored novel even appeared in print in the UK. Danielle Darrieux (in...
-
Martin Roumagnac
Directed by Georges Lacombe • Drama • With Marlene Dietrich, Jean Gabin • 1946 • 108 minutes
This tragic postwar romance is a tale of class anxiety and classic Romantic fatalism, run through with a typically French frankness about sex and gender. Jean Gabin is the titular character, an unpretent...
-
Aimée and Jaguar
Directed by Max Färberböck • Drama • With Juliane Köhler, Maria Schrader • 1999 • 125 minutes
In 1943, while the Allies are bombing Berlin and the Gestapo is purging the capital of Jews, a dangerous love affair blossoms between two women. One of them, Lilly Wust (NOWHERE IN AFRICA’s Juliane Köhl...
-
And Then We Danced (Levan Akin)
Directed by Levan Akin • Drama • With Levan Gelbakhiani, Bachi Valishvili, Ana Javakishvili • 2020 • 113 minutes
A passionate tale of love and liberation set amidst the conservative confines of modern Georgian society, AND THEN WE DANCED follows Merab, a devoted dancer who has been training for ...
-
Perfumes
Directed by Grégory Magne • Drama • With Emmanuelle Devos, Grégory Montel • 2021 • 100 minutes
Anne Walberg is a wildly successful master of perfumes. She has an incredible gift for creating fragrances, but is temperamental and a perfectionist. Guillaume, her new chauffeur, desperately needs the...
-
November
Directed by Rainer Sarnet • Drama • With Rea Lest, Jörgen Liik, Arvo Kukumägi • 2017 • 115 minutes
NOVEMBER is set in a pagan Estonian village where werewolves, the plague, and spirits roam, Rainer Sarnet’s third feature film is a bold, twisted fairy tale about unrequited love. In NOVEMBER, the ...
-
The Off Hours
Directed by Megan Griffiths • Drama • With Amy Seimetz • 2011 • 93 minutes
In THE OFF HOURS, Amy Seimetz alluringly commands the screen as Francine, a waitress whose liberation from her mundane existence is long overdue. In the restless world of the night shift at a highway diner, Francine's lif...
-
Suzanna Andler
Directed by Benoît Jacquot • Drama • With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Niels Schneider • 2021 • 88 minutes
Accompanied by her lover, Suzanna (Charlotte Gainsbourg), 40, views a Riviera beach house for her family's summer vacation. This day, this break in her routine, in this new house, will mark a turn...
-
The Libertine
Directed by Gabriel Alghion • Drama • With Vincent Perez, Fanny Ardant • 2000 • 100 minutes
France, late 18th Century. The State, in alliance with the Church, has forbidden the publication and distribution of Diderot’s Encyclopædia. Meanwhile, Diderot and his family are holed up with some friend...
-
Fasten Your Seatbelts
Directed by Ferzan Özpetek • Drama • With Kasia Smutniak, Francesco Arca, Filippo Scicchitano • 2014 • 111 minutes
Elena and Antonio are not made for one another, having made vastly different personalities and life choices. They see the world differently, they relate differently to others, they ...
-
Will You Marry Us?
Directed by Micha Lewinsky • Drama • With Marie Leuenberger, Dominique Jann • 2009 • 90 minutes
Rahel Hubli is employed as a civil registrar. She hasn’t believed in the so-called “love of her life” in ages. But when a childhood friend, Ben, suddenly turns up, Rahel recalls again what it felt lik...
-
Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell • Drama • With Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Justin Vivian Bond • 2006 • 101 minutes
NSFW. Contains nudity and graphic depictions of sex.
John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS explores the lives of several emotionally challenged characters as they navigate the comic an...
-
Fidelio
Directed by Lucie Borleteau • Drama • With Ariane Labed, Melvil Poupaud, Anders Danielsen Lie, Pascal Tagnati, Jean-Lous Coulloc'h • 2014 • 97 minutes
Thirty-year-old Alice is a sailor about to embark on a journey she will not soon forget. Leaving her fiancé Félix ashore, she joins the crew of a...
-
Sex & Lucía
Directed by Julio Medem • Drama • With Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa, Javier Cámara • 2004 • 122 minutes
Lucía is a young waitress in Madrid, who seeks refuge on a quiet, secluded Mediterranean island after the loss of her longtime boyfriend. Amidst the fresh air, dazzling sun, and glistening deep blu...
-
4 Days in France
Directed by Jérôme Reybaud • Drama • 2017 • 137 minutes
Jérôme Reybaud’s remarkably accomplished feature debut is a sly and sophisticated take on gay romance in the 21st century. On a seemingly ordinary night in Paris, Pierre takes one last look his lover Paul’s sleeping body, then steals away i...
-
Love the One You Love
Directed by Jenna Bass • Drama • With Chi Mhende, Andile Nebulane, Louw Venter • 2015 • 88 minutes
Across the city of Cape Town, a sex-line operator, a dog handler, a love-sick IT-technician and a lonely teenager begin to suspect that their romantic relationships are the subject of a bizarre co...
-
Beloved Sisters
Directed by Dominik Graf • Drama • With Hannah Herzsprung, Florian Stetter, Henriette Confurius • 2015 • 170 minutes
Beloved Sisters depicts the unconventional romance between two aristocratic sisters and a rebellious poet who took the European literary world by storm in the late eighteenth cent...
-
A Tale of Love and Desire
Directed by Leila Bouzid • Drama • 2022 • 103 minutes
Ahmed (Sami Outalbali), French of Algerian origin, grew up in the suburbs of Paris. At the university, he meets Farah (Zbeida Belhajamor), a young Tunisian woman, full of energy, who has just arrived in Paris. While discovering a corpus of se...