Expired pineapple, crying apartments, and one ticket to anywhere. Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough film is a poetic, dreamlike snapshot of mid-90s Hong Kong , and the unassuming noodle shop that serves to intertwine the lives of a few star-crossed would-be lovers.

A low-rent, heartfelt film noir Bonnie & Clyde tale, featuring what may be cinema’s most breathtaking meet-cute. Originally titled The Female of the Species is More Deadly Than the Male. And for good reason.

A French actress and a Japanese architect spend only a handful of hours together in Hiroshima, dissecting the intersection of their lives, the war, and how they’ve come to be two people who could fall so madly, deliriously in love. A defining pillar of the French New Wave; a tiny, short-lived tragic romance in the shadow of one of the 20th century’s most enormous, unfathomable tragedies.

Until I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour, I didn’t know of a clear precedent for Before Sunrise. But the two films fit together like a glove— a man and woman cross paths, spend only a few hours in each other’s company discussing anything and everything about themselves, who they are, and who they might be— all the while knowing they’re soon to be torn apart by circumstance, perhaps never to see each other again. But the few hours they do have are what will last forever.

She, a suburban widow with two grown children. He, a salt-of-the-earth homesteader in touch with his own heart. Their passion for each other burns— but what will the neighbors (and her ungrateful kids) think? Not even the the stultifying societal mores of 1950s suburbia have the power to keep them apart.

Two young people drawn together by forces of fate unknown, to share everything— their bodies, their souls— but doomed to be stranded on opposite sides of a dimensional divide. A romance so pure and impassioned that space-time itself must bend to its will.

Probably my favorite film of all time. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine are flawless as they dance through the pathos and joy of a relationship unformed. Directed by Billy Wilder at the height of his powers, focusing on one tragic, deliriously romantic story hidden in the heart of the big city.

If your heart was broken, and you could remove all memory of that person from your mind, would you do it? And would the universe let you get away with it?

A sung-through technicolor dream of Paris, 1965; a woozy elegy to young love that could have been. There’s not another movie like it.