It's that time of year again. Time to watch the price of roses skyrocket astronomically. Time to call your favorite restaurant and find that they were booked solid a month ago. Time to avert your eyes from that aisle in the grocery store that is so pink it causes epileptic seizures. Yes, it is time once again to celebrate love. And what better way to celebrate love than to avoid the outside world entirely, light a few candles and watch a romantic movie?

Here are the ones I have piled up to watch this week:

The Notebook
A modern classic. It didn't win Oscars or break box office records. Instead it slowly, but surely, cemented itself as the go-to romantic tearjerker of the decade. Much like Love Story before it, this film relied upon a killer, heart-rending premise that brings you near to tears just explaining it to someone. Sure, Nicolas Sparks writes an easy story with cheap sucker punches. They happen to make for some pretty effective films. If this is already a favorite, check out Spark's other perfect adaptation, A Walk to Remember.

Love Actually
How better to celebrate a day of love than with a film entirely devoted to celebrating love in all its many forms? Old love, new love, young love, experienced love, brotherly/fatherly/motherly love, unrequited love, lust... it's all here. This incredibly sweet movie breaks your heart, then sews it back together in one of the most effective feel good endings in recent cinema history. An absolute must.

Shakespeare in Love
Bridging the gap between pop success and critical acclaim was this 1998 masterpiece, a comic riff on the life of Shakespeare and how he came about with his most well known of plays, Romeo and Juliet. Adorable, funny and the prime example of everything the Hollywood indie scene was about in the post-Tarantino '90s, this movie stars pretty much everyone in the Miramax stable. And it is still funny. And heart-breaking.

Down with Love
Almost completely ignored upon release and mostly forgotten, this brilliant send-up of '60s romantic comedies is a loveable spoof that manages to also serve as exactly the type of film it is making fun of. Ewen McGregor and Renee Zellweger star as two people playing the other for their own chance at success. Somewhere along the way, they discover they're actually perfect for one another. Hilarity ensues. Only, this time it actually does.

Stranger than Fiction
What? A Will Ferrell comedy directed by the director (Marc Forster) of the next Bond film? On a Valentine's Day list? Damn right. Easily the sweetest and most touching of either Ferrell's or Forster's works, this is the story of a man who discovers that he is actually the lead character in someone else's novel, and that the writer has designs on killing him tragically. This is a cuddle up on the couch, laugh and cry movie if ever there was one.

Your honey "out of town?"? here are 5 Movies That Won't Remind You You're Alone

C. Robert Cargill - - - Email Me

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