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!

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Romance
  • 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...

  • 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.

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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 ...