Love and a VCR

Sexiest Kiss in a Hitchcock Film: Rear Window Beating out even Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant's prolonged smooch in Notorious is Rear Window's opening liplock between a drowsing, incapacitated Jimmy Stewart, as shuttermonkey L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, and an ethereal, pre-princess Grace Kelly, as love-struck society gal Lisa Fremont. Hitch and his DP Robert Burks filmed the Technicolor clinch in close-up and then double printed each frame in slow-motion, giving the brief sequence a sexy surreality that fairly flames the screen with its tender passion. -- Marc Savlov

It's the sine qua non of heartbreaking farewells: While a train carries mechanic Nino Castelnuovo away from his girlfriend, shopgirl Catherine Deneuve (17 and unexpectedly pregnant), and toward a two-year tour of duty in Algeria, Jacques Demy's camera dollies backward down the rain-soaked platform, and Michel Legrand's sublime score swells. Not a dry eye in the house. -- Marrit Ingman

Ed Wood, who is frequently cited as the world's worst filmmaker, is also widely beloved for the passion and personality he invested in his films. Playing the lead in his transvestism magnum opus, Glen or Glenda, Wood spends the movie trying to figure out how to tell his fiancée about his need to wear women's clothes. Instead of recoiling in horror, his betrothed Delores Fuller responds by stripping off her angora sweater and handing it to her lover. It's a radical moment in cinema: Not only does she not mind his fetishes, she wants to join in the fun, too. -- Marjorie Baumgarten

Maybe each generation gets the Romeo and Juliet it deserves (Baz Lurhmann's loud + pompous 1996 version certainly felt like a justly earned punishment); Valley Girl, released in the first flush of Eighties vapidity, is unassuming and totally brainless, but amazingly still manages to work as all its other organs are throbbing away. Valley Girl scraps the poetic language, the pathos, and, hell, just about everything from the original and simply rewrites the central timeless story -- that of really dumb people in really real love -- in broadstroke curlicues of endorphins, testosterone, and hairspray. It works. -- Will Robinson Sheff

Fresh off of Hitchcock's Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak were again paired as mismatched lovers in 1958's Bell, Book and Candle; this time she's a witch who "can't fall in love, not really," and he's a New York City publisher who digs drunken Ernie Kovacs. Novak is positively luminous in this smart and sexy precursor to television's Bewitched, and a young Jack Lemmon is mad for the racket as her googly eyed beatnik/ warlock brother. Unfairly forgotten, this is pure, unadulterated Fifties romantic kitsch that mines Greenwich Village's ginchy beatnik vibe for laughs and comes up brimming with honest-to-goodness magic. -- Marc Savlov

He's a googly-eyed hedgehog with a lisp, the newest member of the Fabulous Feebles Variety Hour troupe. She's a fuzzy hoofer (by my guess, some kind of foo-foo dog) whose gorgeous gams attract the despicable manager, who wants to taint her virtue. Will true love prevail? Or will she become the main attraction in an underground, interspecies porno ring? A seriously gross, perverse puppet satire, but director Peter Jackson tugs the heartstrings with this old-fashioned subplot. -- Marrit Ingman

After his elevated cameras, double projections, and crossfades had taken F.W. Murnau about as far as anyone can go down the path of cinematic artifice, he found himself making what would be the last film of his career in the natural light of Tabu's tropical isle, filming amateur actors, naked bodies, and lapping waves with documentarian Robert Flaherty and cameraman Floyd Crosby. Robust and glowing in the sun, Murnau's two lovers radiate a chemistry rarely captured on film: As they dance, swim, run, and climb, the love and desire between them leaps off the screen, and its presence makes this 1931 film's conclusion -- "tragic," in the classical sense -- unforgettable. -- Will Robinson Sheff

Any film with the word "abominable" in the title scores high marks in my book, but this 1971 Vincent Price shocker nails the Book o' Love as well. Obsessed with the idea that the physicians who operated on his beloved, dead wife Vulnavia botched the job, Phibes -- ex-concert pianist and skull-faced mad genius -- sets out to off the murderin' quacks using the Old Testament's 10 plagues as his Se7en-esque template. Rats, bats, bugs, and slugs make quick work of the Hippocratic hypocrites, but it's Phibes' unslakeable thirst for romance that really keeps the joy pumping. Malpractice, malfeasance, and malingering maladjustment = mad phun! -- Marc Savlov

Jack Thompson is the kind of dad who barges in on his kid's first date to offer beer, show off his prize tomatoes, provide porn and safe-sex literature, and proclaim to your guy, "I want you to think of this as your home, too." Never mind that his child is 24-year-old plumber Russell Crowe, who's looking for Mr. Right. Thompson's warm, boisterous performance is terribly sweet. Everyone now: "Love is the greatest adventure of all." -- Marrit Ingman

She -- Barbra Streisand -- was a political organizer, unconventionally pretty with dark, feisty curls. He -- Robert Redford -- was a sandy-haired frat boy with a twinkly smile who looked good in a uniform. They fell in love, and at 14, that was all I wanted to know about love -- that anything was possible. Imagine my heartbreak when they couldn't keep it together. My junior high girlfriends -- four out of five of whom turned out to be lesbians -- and I cried for an afternoon. Now that I think about it, I was the only one wailing, "But, why, why can't they love each other?!," the Maybelline eye shadow streaking down my face. "They were so much in love!" My closeted friends were probably wondering the same thing, but I was the only one allowed to ask that question out loud. -- Belinda Acosta

An underrated charmer about young black urbanites in the hip Chicago slam scene, love jones pits its central paramours, Nina (Nia Long) and Darius (Larenz Tate), in a tooth-and-nail struggle to not succumb to love's stranglehold. Of course, we know the two scrappers are eventually gonna give in to the big bang of love, but in the meantime, the seriously in-denial Darius shrugs off his friends' probing with the so cool, so casual: "It ain't a love thang -- we just kickin' it." Yeah, right. -- Kimberley Jones

There's not even a glimpse of sex in this movie, but when the lights go up, everyone looks spent. Thank god for censorship, which made the producers intimate sex where there wasn't any (the sexiest movie sex there is). Paul Newman, as a mean, vain, wild-eyed lout who stands to inherit his father's ranch in windblown North Texas, can have any woman in the county. Patricia Neal, who plays Alma, the maid on the ranch who's a little bit bohemian, a little bit hard-scrabble, and all hard glamour, doesn't give him what he wants. "Why don't you go stick your head in the water trough and sober up for lunch?" she asks him. He does that, eventually, but by then something has to give. "I've already had one cold-blooded bastard, I'm not lookin' for another," she informs him. "It's too late, honey, you already found him," he replies. -- Clay Smith