Love Is in the Air, on the Screen: AFI Silver's 'Screen Valentines: Great Movie Romances'

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AH, FEBRUARY, WHEN a young man's thoughts lightly turn to the buying of flowers and chocolates, and then darkly turn to the prospect of being dragged to some paint-by-numbers rom-com. Fortunately, AFI Silver offers a few Valentine viewing alternatives with its "Screen Valentines: Great Movie Romances" series.

It starts off old-school this weekend with 1938's "Bringing Up Baby," one of the best of the rapid-fire screwball comedies and certainly the only one starring a Brontosaurus skeleton and a leopard (the titular Baby). The bones, the beast and the boy (Cary Grant) are playfully tormented by loopy free spirit Katherine Hepburn, who seems to be improvising constantly. It's hard to believe this was her big comedic debut, and even harder to believe that Grant's line, "I just went gay all of a sudden!" made it past the censors.

If you like your movies newer but your stories older, Ang Lee's costume drama "Sense and Sensibility" has several love stories, Hugh Laurie surliness, plus (spoiler alert) a double wedding. As Emma Thompson quietly loves a relatively non-bumbling Hugh Grant, brash young Kate Winslet upbraids her with the line: "Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections?" In this case, yes, although the English countryside locations help a lot.

There aren't many polite affections in "High Fidelity" because most of the characters are anything but polite — particularly Jack Black in his breakout role as the all-too-believable indie-record-store clerk. But not far behind is John Cusack's character, who's obsessed with lists and has more trouble with women than a certain Top Ten list TV guy.

Finally, you can see two films this season about an American reporter in Rome who falls for a mysterious girl. "When in Rome" has Kristen Bell as an art curator, and "Roman Holiday" has Audrey Hepburn as a princess. Your call.

Written by Express contributor Paul Stelter
Photo courtesy Melissa Mosley