 As a historical romance between two women set on an island in Brittany, Portrait of a Lady on Fire sounds like standard prestige-picture fare: a stately tale of burning desire and repression, with unsubtle parallels to our own time. But even if Céline Sciamma's film teems with lustful glances and pointed critiques of marriage and patriarchy, it's infinitely more interesting, sensuous, and arresting than that description makes it sound. With its overt feminism and depiction of the burgeoning identity of a young female artist, the film inevitably conjures recent fare like The Souvenir and Greta Gerwig's Little Women, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the most compelling and quietly radical among them: an enigmatic film about the battle waged between realism and expressionism.
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 Even those who bristle at romantic comedies may find themselves wooed by Roman Holiday: shot entirely in Rome, featuring Audrey Hepburn in her debut performance, and directed by one of the finest storytellers in the Golden Age of Hollywood, there’s simply no resisting the most romantic movie ever made. The effervescent joys of Roman Holiday are even more surprising considering the quiet, lingering tone of the film—with lengthy stretches devoted not to plot progression, but to character development—and the lack of a happy ending (or, at least, the happy ending we might have expected). There’s no question the movie is about love, but it’s also about the raw deal that fate or happenstance seems to offer us much of the time: “Life isn’t always what one likes,” says one character, but Roman Holiday is still hopeful that it can occasionally provide us with euphoric splendors.
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