Romance

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!

Share
Romance
  • Never Too Late for Love

    Directed by Gianni di Gregorio • Drama • With Gianni di Gregorio, Stefania Sandrelli • 2023 • 91 minutes

    Italian actor-director Gianni Di Gregorio (CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, THE SALT OF LIFE) returns to filmmaking with NEVER TOO LATE FOR LOVE, a tender and lighthearted romantic comedy set against t...

  • The Queen of Hearts

    Directed by Valérie Donzelli • Drama • With Valerie Donzelli, Jeremie Elkalim • 2009 • 88 minutes

    Thirty-something Adele is devastated following a painful breakup. With no close friends or family, her distant cousin, Rachel, reluctantly takes her in and graciously attempts to salvage Adele’s pro...

  • 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...

  • The Salt of Tears

    Directed by Philippe Garrel • Drama • With Logann Antuofermo, Oulaya Amamra, André Wilms • 2020 • 101 minutes

    Veteran filmmaker Philippe Garrel once again fashions a pinpoint-precise and economical study of young love and its prevarications, which ever so gradually blossoms into an emotionally r...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • The Names of Love

    Directed by Michel Leclerc • Drama • With Sara Forestier • 2011 • 102 minutes

    Baya Benmahmoud, a young, extroverted liberal, lives by the old hippie slogan: “Make love, not war” to convert right-wing men to her left-wing political causes by sleeping with them. She seduces many and so far has rec...

  • 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...

  • Quantum Love

    Directed by Lisa Azuelos • Drama • With Sophie Marceau, François Cluzet • 2014 • 81 minutes

    A family man's encounter with a beautiful woman develops into a mutual fascination.

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Stop-Zemlia

    Directed by Kateryna Gornostai • Drama • 2021 • 122 minutes

    Hanging out with friends, smoking too much, spinning bottles and kissing, making mistakes, playing, refusing to accept, dreaming with open eyes – life as a teenager can be overwhelmingly beautiful and difficult at the same time. Introve...

  • The Second Time Around

    Directed by Leon Marr • Drama • With Linda Thorson, Stuart Margolin • 2017 • 108 minutes

    Katherine Mitchell (Linda Thorson), a widowed yet vibrant senior, wasn't looking for love a second time - not at her age, and certainly not with grumpy Isaac Shapiro (Stuart Margolin). Despite the nosey bunc...

  • 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...

  • Julietta

    Directed by Marc Allégret • Drama • With Jean Marais, Dany Robin, Jeanne Moreau • 1953 • 97 minutes

    JULIETTA is a romantic comedy with the whimsical energy of a hummingbird. Dany Robin stars as the eponymous demoiselle, a flighty, impulsive pixie in white gloves who is engaged to an older prince...

  • 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...

  • After Blue (Dirty Paradise)

    Directed by Bertrand Mandico • Drama • With Elina Löwensohn, Paula Luna • 2021 • 129 minutes

    In a faraway future, on a wild and untamed female inhabited planet called After Blue, a lonely teenager named Roxy (Paula Luna) unknowingly releases a mystical, dangerous, and sensual assassin from her p...

  • Odette Toulemonde

    Directed by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt • Drama • With Catherine Frot, Albert Dupontel, Jacques Weber • 2006 • 100 minutes

    Objectively, Odette Toulemonde has nothing to be happy about, but is. Balthazar Balsan has everything to be happy about, but isn't. Odette, awkwardly forty, with a delightful hair...

  • Saturday Night at the Baths

    Directed by David Buckley • Drama • 1975 • 82 minutes

    Newly restored in 4K, David Buckley's landmark excursion into bisexuality, 70s relationship politics, and the historical importance of gay bathhouse culture is celebrated in his 1975 film Saturday Night at the Baths. When struggling pianist M...

  • The Bridesmaid (Claude Chabrol)

    Directed by Claude Chabrol • Drama • With Benoit Magimal, Laura Smet, Aurore Clement, Bernard Le Coq, Selene Bouton, Anna Mihalcea • 2004 • 110 minutes

    It's love at first sight when bridesmaid Senta falls into the life of handsome young Philippe at the wedding of his younger sister. As their pa...

  • 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...

  • A Game for Six Lovers (L’eau à la bouche)

    Directed by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze • Drama • With Bernadette Lafont, Françoise Brion • 1960 • 84 minutes

    One of the founders of the epochal film magazine Cahiers du cinema, and therefore a prime mover of the French New Wave, Doniol-Valcroze joined all the upstart critics making films in the lat...