Love stinks: 25 anti-romance movies to get you through Valentine's Day

Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston play mismatched lovers driven apart by selfishness and a basic incompatibility they should’ve taken note of before they moved in together. This Peyton Reed-directed film is surprisingly dark for a studio comedy; these characters like and care for each other, but they’re hanging on for largely logistical/material reasons. And yet for all the ensuing nastiness, it’s winds up being a surprisingly humane film about the difference between attraction and romance.

The New York Times’ Ben Brantley aptly described Edward Albee’s turbulent drama a depiction of “marriage as blood sport,”and there’s never been a more thrillingly vitriolic rendition of the play than Mike Nichols’s 1966 film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as the vituperative George and Martha. Pour some stiff cocktails, and watch two titans of acting tear away at each other and the societal institution that binds them together.

The antithesis of “War of the Roses,” Alan Parker’s “Shoot the Moon” addresses marital discord with an unflinching honesty that leaves you emotionally drained. Albert Finney and Diane Keaton are superb as a married couple who have fallen out of love with each other, resulting in infidelity and a simmering bitterness that eventually boils over into rage. This all takes a devastating toll on the couple’s four children. Domesticity is hell.

Here’s a feel-good (or at least better) film about divorce! Hugh Wilson directs Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler in this amusing adaptation of Olivia Goldsmith’s novel courtesy of sass-master Robert Harling (“Steel Magnolias”). It’s all empty calories, but for anyone who’s ever been cheated on (married or otherwise), it’s a serviceable revenge fantasy featuring ace supporting turns from Dan Hedaya, Victor Garber, Marcia Gay Harden and Elizabeth Berkley.

Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) were once madly in love, but six years into their marriage, neither of them is where they need to be emotionally. Derek Cianfrance’s non-linear storytelling intriguingly contrasts their initial romantic heat with the tepid dissatisfaction that has crept into the relationship, and, to his credit, he doesn’t offer any easy answers. It’s a downer love story that’s a little too tidy in its cynicism, but it's never less than engrossing thanks to the brilliance of Gosling and, especially, Williams.

“Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.” The romantic travails of four screwed-up people (played to the bitter hilt by Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen) are given a vigorous examination in Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Patrick Marber’s wittily acerbic play. For all its nastiness, it’s a surprisingly likable movie; you may not warm to these characters, but you’re lying to yourself if you can’t relate on some level to their bratty grievances. Nothing makes us behave more like children than love and the fear of betrayal.

Gillian Flynn’s bestselling sucker-punch of a thriller gets a faithfully misanthropic adaptation from director David Fincher. Ben Affleck is perfectly cast as a good-looking charmer who can’t help but come off as the type of guy who would kill his wife, dispose of the body, and then launch a PR campaign to enlist the public’s help in finding her. The truth is way more twisted, however, and it’s a blast to play this mean-spirited game from the unreliable perspective of the ostensible victim, Amy (a brilliant Rosamund Pike).

Takashi Miike’s masterpiece starts off innocuously enough as a whimsical romantic comedy about a sad-sack widower who gets coaxed by his movie producer friend into holding bogus auditions for a new wife (and mother to his young son). When he finds the woman he believes to be the one, things slowly go to hėll before winding up at a terminus that makes hell look like a Caribbean honeymoon. Kiri, kiri, kiri…

Two young lovers on vacation in Sardinia quarrel and reconcile and quarrel and so on to the point where you can’t decided if this duo should be forcibly separated or if they’re just bickering kindred spirits. What looks like constant chaos on the outside is nothing more than the quicksilver nature of romance brilliantly captured by filmmaker Maren Ade and her performers (Birgit Minichmayr and Lars Eidinger). They keep fighting because there’s something worth fighting for; it may not be the most comforting thought, but it’s the fighting that keeps us together.

A recently divorced architect (James Spader) falls in lust with a beautiful stranger (Mädchen Amick), and the sex is so blindingly sensational, he quickly finds himself not only remarried, but a father as well. And that’s when he starts noticing this dream woman is not all she appears to be. The more he learns about his wife, the more paranoid he becomes that everything about their marriage – even their kids – is a sham. Watch this morally reprehensible thriller with someone you implicitly trust, and see how you feel about them at the end.

The highlight of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt”, aside from Raoul Cotard’s gorgeous color cinematography (and Georges Delerue’s sorrowful score), is an extended sequence in which we watch the real-time dissolution of a marriage. It’s an exhausting argument between a French playwright (Michel Piccoli) and his wife (Brigitte Bardot) who’s accompanied him to Rome where he’s to write an adaptation of "The Odyssey" for a boorish American producer (Jack Palance). Neither combatant will cede an inch of ground, and, in this case, it turns out the honest airing of grievances isn’t so healthy after all.

Paramount scored an unlikely date movie hit with this erotic thriller about a married lawyer (Michael Douglas) who has a torrid affair with a book editor (Glenn Close) while his wife and daughter are away for the weekend. Adrian Lyne frontloads the movie with some of the most smoldering sex scenes ever put to film before deftly segueing into the mounting, inescapable horror of the second and third acts. The bum ending (famously reshot when test audiences rejected the original downer conclusion) lets Douglas and the audience off the hook, but it’s still a first-rate cautionary tale about infidelity.

The names have been changed to protect Carl Bernstein, but there’s no mistaking that Nora Ephron’s Heartburn novel is a thinly fictionalized account of her marriage to the philandering journalist. Ephron wrote the film adaptation for director Mike Nichols, and while it’s frustratingly episodic at times, well, relationships can feel segmented and prone to change on a dime like that, too. Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson make the most of every moment they share onscreen, and Carly Simon’s “Coming Around Again” strikes a light melancholic tone that drifts through the entire movie.

Adrian Lyne returns to the theme of marital infidelity with this more measured, far less exploitative thriller about a middle-aged married woman (Diane Lane) who inches her way into a, what else, torrid affair with an impossibly handsome former-boxer-turned-antique-book-dealer (Olivier Martinez). Lane gives a career-best performance as a woman seduced into adultery by the notion of being desired. We understand, and, unlike Douglas’s hοrndog lawyer in "Fatal Attraction," sympathize with her weakness. Alas, someone has to die in this love triangle, too, and it isn't the dull, yet loving husband (Richard Gere).

Steve McQueen’s blunt-force drama stars Michael Fassbender as a successful New York City bachelor who suffers from sex addiction. As is his dour wont, McQueen burrows into the despair and degredation of his protagonist’s inability to establish a connection with a woman that doesn’t end once his below-the-waist desires are fulfilled. It’s ugly stuff, and maybe too much of a wallow by the end, but you can’t take your eyes off Fassbender no matter how hard you try.

Spike Lee’s portrait of a woman cycling through lovers in search of the right one is both a classic romantic comedy and a strangely liberating declaration of emotional independence. Lola Darling lays it out in her closing direct-address to the audience: “It’s really about control, my body, my mind. Who was going to own it? Them or me? I’m not a one-man woman. Bottom line.” Lee reworked the film as a Netflix miniseries last year, and it’s far more hopeful than the original film.

After the rousing adventure of "Romancing the Stone" and "Jewel of the Nile," audiences were wholly unprepared for this vicious black comedy about divorce from Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito. It’s a brutally funny account of a perfect marriage turned toxic, eliciting belly laughs from the escalating pettiness of Douglas and Turner’s characters. Pairs deliciously with pâté and fish!

Film noir is anti-romance at its core. Falling for someone, usually a beautiful dame, is a sucker play. That’s what makes Nicholas Ray’s "In a Lonely Place" so special: it sucks you into a romance that you know is doomed, and still tears you apart when it all goes south. Humphrey Bogart plays an alcoholic screenwriter prone to violent (maybe murderous) outbursts who’s nursed back to sobriety and success by his aspiring actress neighbor (Gloria Grahame). She knows as clearly as the rest of us what she’s in for, but love clouds her judgment – and nearly gets her killed.

Mike Nichols has three movies on this list, and could easily have a fourth in "The Graduate." “Carnal Knowledge” is a purer distillation of male emotional dysfunction. Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel represent a pathetic yin and yang of arrested sexual development: the former objectifies women, while the other coldly worships them. Jules Feiffer’s screenplay paints in broad strokes, but everyone knows a terror like Nicholson’s character, who, in a corker of a speech, berates his live-in girlfriend (Ann-Margret) for sinking into a depression he’s single-handedly driven her into.

Albert Hitchcock’s masterpiece of obsession is lush, mesmerizing, as formally perfect as a man-made thing can be and probably the worst date movie of all time. Jimmy Stewart stars as retired detective Scottie Ferguson who falls for a woman who falls to her death, subsequently falls into a deep depression, then reemerges and tragically falls into the same routine all over again. Everyone’s someone’s Kim Novak.

Judith Rossner’s novel about a lonely young schoolteacher who cruises singles bars at night caused quite a stir when it was published in 1975. The film adaptation, written and directed by Richard Brooks, was less a character study than a cautionary tale, angering the book’s admirers and the author herself. But even in this compromised state, Diane Keaton gives one of her most underrated performances as a woman desperate to fill an emotional void through booze-fueled hookups.

Stanley Kubrick’s final film paired then married superstars Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in a psychological thriller driven by jealousy, desire and, evidently, some very potent weed. Incensed by Kidman’s confession of an imagined infidelity, Cruise sets out on an overnight odyssey in search of vengeful sexual gratification (or just the appearance of it, which might even the score in his feverishly resentful mind). It’s one of the great films about marriage, but far from the most reassuring.

Couples are often told that they should try new experiences to keep their romance fresh. In David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s cult novel "Crash," a married couple (James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger) finds that the key to saving their marriage might just lie in the sexual fetishization of car crashes. Cronenberg’s chilly eroticism finds a disturbing logic in Ballard’s gonzo metaphor. That the film is not outrageous may be the most outrageous thing about it.

Jane Campion’s erotically charged cop thriller stars Meg Ryan as an English professor who falls for a NYPD detective (Mark Ruffalo) currently investigating a string of murders on the Lower East Side for which he might just be the prime suspect. The film’s intoxicating, half-awake vibe allows one to look past its shortcomings as a whodunit, and fall headlong into Campion’s deliriously twisty (and tortured) examination of gender and sexuality.

 “You’ve heard of a no-win situation, haven’t you? Vietnam? This?” Albert Brooks kicks off his bruisingly hilarious send-up of romance and jealousy with his character dumping his girlfriend (Kathryn Harrold) because he can’t be sure she didn’t cheat on him. He then spends the rest of the film desperately trying to win her back only to drive her away again. You loathe Brooks’s character in this movie in part because you can’t help but identify with him on some level. Who hasn’t spent a little too much time in their head and convinced themselves that their significant other has cheated on them? The difference here is that he acts on it. Repeatedly. And you wince through every laugh.