Best New love Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of new love cinema — measured across 1,476 indexed frames from 18 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
New love films over-index on girl, sofa and mirror — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
No Reservations (2007)
Scott HicksDP Stuart DryburghIMDb 6.3TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
A master chef, Kate, lives her life like she runs the kitchen at upscale 22 Bleecker Restaurant in Manhattan--with a no-nonsense intensity that both captivates and intimidates everyone around her. With breathtaking precision, she powers through each hectic shift, coordinating hundreds of meals, preparing delicate sauces, seasoning and simmering each dish to absolute perfection.
- 2
Because I Said So (2007)
Michael LehmannDP Julio MacatIMDb 5.6TMDB 5.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Approaching age sixty, Daphne Wilder divorced when she was young, has not dated since, and has raised on her own and has fostered a close, loving relationship with her three daughters, Maggie, Mae and Milly, she now assisting Milly in her successful catering business. Daphne was mother of the bride for a first time at Maggie's wedding, and a second time at Mae's wedding, but she fears there won't be a third and final time for a Milly wedding in insecure Milly attracting only who seem to be the wrong men. Not wanting Milly to turn into another "alone" version of herself at age sixty, Daphne, without telling any of her daughters let alone Milly, decides to take matters into her own hands by placing a personal ad for a potential mate for Milly. Scheduling all seventeen interviews in succession at a restaurant, Daphne finds the ad has attracted one "loser" after another, until she reaches number seventeen, Jason, an architect who is handsome and seems smart, well-bred, successful and forward thinking about his life. The two arrange for Jason to meet Milly by "accident". What Daphne does not anticipate is that there ends up being a number eighteen, Johnny, who witnessed the interviews from the sidelines as the guitarist performing at the restaurant, and while Johnny did approach Daphne in his interest in meeting Milly from what he heard of the interviews, she immediately dismissed him solely because he is a musician and thus irresponsible by nature, much like her ex-husband. In their accidental meetings, Milly embarks on a relationship with both Jason and Johnny concurrently, and upon learning about Johnny in the picture, Daphne starts pushing Jason as the favored one to Milly. Beyond Milly, Jason and Johnny's own thoughts about their two relationships, the two men who know nothing about the other being in Milly's life, a question becomes how Milly eventually learning about the ad, an inevitability, will factor into what happens, not only about Milly's love life but her relationship with her mother. In helping Milly with her love life and only fostered by watching old Gary Cooper movies, Daphne may dredge up latent feelings of romance of her own, it which she may find in the most unlikely of places.
- 3
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Peter BogdanovichDP Robert SurteesIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →
In tiny Anarene, Texas, in the lull between World War Two and the Korean Conflict, Sonny and Duane are best friends. Enduring that awkward period of life between boyhood and manhood, the two pass their time the best way they know how -- with the movie house, football, and girls. Jacy is Duane's steady, wanted by every boy in school, and she knows it. Her daddy is rich and her mom is good looking and loose. It's the general consensus that whoever wins Jacy's heart will be set for life. But Anarene is dying a quiet death as folks head for the big cities to make their livings and raise their kids. The boys are torn between a future somewhere out there beyond the borders of town or making do with their inheritance of a run-down pool hall and a decrepit movie house -- the legacy of their friend and mentor, Sam the Lion. As high school graduation approaches, they learn some difficult lessons about love, loneliness, and jealousy. Then folks stop attending the second-run features at the movie house and the time comes for the last picture show. With the closure of the movie house, the boys feel that a stage of their lives is closing. They stand uneasily on the threshold of the rest of their lives. (The movie was adapted from the novel by Larry McMurtry).
- 4
Atonement (2007)
Joe WrightDP Seamus McGarveyIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →
When Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), thirteen-years-old and an aspiring writer, sees her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) at the fountain in front of the family estate, she misinterprets what is happening, thus setting into motion a series of misunderstandings and a childish pique that will have lasting repercussions for all of them. Robbie is the son of a family servant toward whom the family has always been kind. They paid for his time at Cambridge and now he plans on going to medical school. After the fountain incident, Briony reads a letter intended for Cecilia and concludes that Robbie is a deviant. When her cousin Lola (Juno Temple) is raped, she tells the Police that it was Robbie she saw committing the deed.
- 5
Ron HowardDP Donald PetermanIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →
Inside a snowflake exists the magical land of Whoville, wherein live the Whos, an almost-mutated sort of Munchkin-like people who all love Christmas. Just outside of their beloved town lives the Grinch (Jim Carrey), a nasty creature that hates Christmas and plans to steal it from the Whos, which he equally abhors. Little Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen) decides to befriend the Grinch.
- 6
Anton CorbijnDP Martin RuheIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Ian Curtis is a quiet and rather sad lad who works for an employment agency and sings in a band called Warsaw. He meets a girl named Debbie whom he promptly marries and his band, of which the name in the meantime has been changed to Joy Division, gets more and more successful. Even though Debbie and he become parents, their relationship is going downhill rapidly and Ian starts an affair with Belgium Annik whom he met after one of the gigs and he's almost never at home. Ian also suffers from epilepsy and has no-good medication for it. He doesn't know how to handle the feelings he has for Debbie and Annik and the pressure the popularity of Joy Division and the energy performing costs him.
- 7
Meet Dave (2008)
Brian RobbinsDP Clark MathisIMDb 5.1TMDB 5.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Eddie Murphyas Dave / Captain
Elizabeth Banksas Gina Morrison
Gabrielle Unionas No. 3 - Cultural Officer
A spaceship shaped like a human lands face first on Liberty Island. Its crew (of tiny, intelligent, and unemotional beings) is looking for an orb sent from its planet to extract the oceans' salt, which will ruin Earth. The orb is in the possession of Josh, the fifth-grade son of a single mom whose car strikes the ambulatory alien spaceship and cripples its power supply. The crew has 48 hours to recover the orb, throw it in the Atlantic, and leave Earth. Over the course of two days, the ship's crew experiences chaos and emotion in New York. Do Earth's giants - Josh and his mom - have anything to teach these brainy aliens? Meanwhile, mutiny is afoot and the cops are closing in.
- 8
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Anthony MinghellaDP John SealeIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →
The 1950s. Manhattan lavatory attendant, Tom Ripley, borrows a Princeton jacket to play piano at a garden party. When the wealthy father of a recent Princeton grad chats Tom up, Tom pretends to know the son and is soon offered $1,000 to go to Italy to convince Dickie Greenleaf to return home. In Italy, Tom attaches himself to Dickie and to Marge, Dickie's cultured fiancée, pretending to love jazz and harboring homoerotic hopes as he soaks in luxury. Besides lying, Tom's talents include impressions and forgery, so when the handsome and confident Dickie tires of Tom, dismissing him as a bore, Tom goes to extreme lengths to make Greenleaf's privileges his own.
- 9
The Red Shoes (1948)
Emeric Pressburger, Michael PowellDP Jack CardiffIMDb 8.1TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Under the authoritarian rule of charismatic ballet impressario Boris Lermontov, his proteges realize the full promise of their talents, but at a price: utter devotion to their art and complete loyalty to Lermontov himself. Under his near-obsessive guidance, young ballerina Victoria Page is poised for superstardom, but earns Lermontov's scorn when she falls in love with Julian Craster, composer of "The Red Shoes," the ballet Lermontov is staging to showcase her talents. Vicky leaves the company and marries Craster, but still finds herself torn between Lermontov's demands and those of her heart.
- 10
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Alain ResnaisDP Michio TakahashiIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →
The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.
What new love films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a new love frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — girl is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- girl1.8×
- sofa1.7×
- mirror1.6×
- necklace1.5×
- table lamp1.5×
How new love 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 new love from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 22%high keyvs 12% baseline
- 10%interior indeterminatevs 7% baseline
- 31%low keyvs 40% baseline
- 85%eye levelvs 69% baseline
What breaks the pattern
Shoot 'Em Up (2007) 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 1,476 frames from 18 films carrying the new love 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/new-love
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