Best Love triangle Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of love triangle cinema — measured across 3,318 indexed frames from 47 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Love triangle films over-index on fedora, hat and sweater — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Jean-Luc GodardDP Raoul CoutardIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
A triangle: Franz, Arthur, and Odile. Franz, a young man with Alain Delon good looks, has met Odile in an English class. She lives in Joinville with wealthy benefactors and has mentioned to Franz that Mr. Stolz keeps a pile of 10,000 franc notes unlocked in his room. Franz tells his friend Arthur, a swarthy guy whose shady uncle is pressing him for money. Arthur and Franz, who mimic American movie tough guys, case Odile's house, pressure her to assist them with a burglary, and make passes at her as well. She's alternately compliant and distressed. Will they pull off the heist?
- Watch
- Darkroom
- 2
Casablanca (1942)
Michael CurtizDP Arthur EdesonIMDb 8.5TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →
The story of Rick Blaine, a cynical world-weary ex-patriate who runs a nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco during the early stages of WWII. Despite the pressure he constantly receives from the local authorities, Rick's cafe has become a kind of haven for refugees seeking to obtain illicit letters that will help them escape to America. But when Ilsa, a former lover of Rick's, and her husband, show up to his cafe one day, Rick faces a tough challenge which will bring up unforeseen complications, heartbreak and ultimately an excruciating decision to make.
- 3
Jules and Jim (1962)
François TruffautDP Raoul CoutardIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
In pre-WWI Paris, two friends, Jules (Austrian) and Jim (French), fall in love with the same woman, Catherine. But Catherine loves and marries Jules. When they meet again in Germany after the war, Catherine starts to love Jim - This is the story of three people in love, a love that doesn't affect their friendship, and about how their relationship evolves with the years.
- 4
Contempt (Le Mépris) (1963)
Jean-Luc GodardDP Raoul CoutardIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang to direct an adaptation of "The Odyssey," but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb at the box office, he brings in a screenwriter to energize the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.
- 5
Brooklyn (2015)
John CrowleyDP Yves BélangerIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Ireland, early 1950s. Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) is a young woman working in a grocery shop. She has greater ambitions and moves to Brooklyn, New York, leaving her mother and sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott), behind. She is terribly homesick but eventually settles down, finding a job, studying to be a bookkeeper and meeting a nice young Italian man, Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen). Things are going well, but then she learns that Rose has died, and decides to return to Ireland, temporarily. She and Tony hastily get married, and then she sets off back to Ireland, alone. Life is about to get complicated.
- 6
Amelie (2001)
Jean-Pierre JeunetDP Bruno DelbonnelIMDb 8.3TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
At a tiny Parisian café, the adorable yet painfully shy Amélie accidentally discovers a gift for helping others. Soon Amelie is spending her days as a matchmaker, guardian angel, and all-around do-gooder. But when she bumps into a handsome stranger, will she find the courage to become the star of her very own love story?
- 7
Z for Zachariah (2015)
Craig ZobelDP Tim OrrIMDb 6.0TMDB 5.7See in full on FrameThrower →
In the wake of a nuclear war, a young woman survives on her own, fearing she may actually be the proverbial last woman on earth, until she discovers the most astonishing sight of her life: another human being. A distraught scientist, he’s nearly been driven mad by radiation exposure and his desperate search for others. A fragile, imperative strand of trust connects them. But when a stranger enters the valley, their precarious bond begins to unravel.
- 8
Days Of Heaven (1978)
Terrence MalickDP Néstor AlmendrosIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Bill and Abby, a young couple who to the outside world pretend to be brother and sister are living and working in Chicago at the beginning of the century. They want to escape the poverty and hard labor of the city and travel south. Together with the girl Linda (who acts as the narrator in the movie) they find employment on a farm in the Texas panhandle. When the harvest is over the young, rich and handsome farmer invites them to stay because he has fallen in love with Abby. When Bill and Abby discover that the farmer is seriously ill and has only got a year left to live they decide that Abby will accept his wedding proposal in order to make some benefit out of the situation. When the expected death fails to come, jealousy and impatience are slowly setting in and accidents become eventually inevitable.
- 9
To Be or Not To Be (1942)
Ernst LubitschDP Rudolph MatéIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →
Joseph and Maria Tura operate and star in their own theater company in Warsaw. Maria has many admirers including a young lieutenant in the Polish air force, Stanislav Sobinski. When the Nazis invade Poland to start World War II, Sobinski and his colleagues flee to England while the Turas find themselves now having to operate under severe restrictions, including shelving a comical play they had written about Adolf Hitler. In England meanwhile, Sobinski and his friends give Professor Siletski - who is about to return to Poland - the names and addresses of their closest relatives so the professor can carry messages for them. When it's learned that Siletski is really a German spy, Sobinski parachutes into Poland and enlists the aid of the Turas and their fellow actors to get that list back.
- 10
Yi-Yi (A One and A Two) (2000)
Edward YangDP Yang Wei-hanIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Portrait of a middle-class family in Taipei. A man in his forties, his teenage daughter and his eight-year-old son experience life, navigating between remorse, hope and disappointment.
What love triangle films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a love triangle frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — fedora is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- fedora2.2×
- hat2.1×
- sweater1.8×
- lamp1.6×
- glass1.5×
How love triangle films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate love triangle from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 87%eye levelvs 69% baseline
What breaks the pattern
3-Iron (2004) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 3,318 frames from 47 films carrying the love triangle label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/love-triangle
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