Movies have at all times created an aura of magic and charm in the world of dream. From Andrew Lincoln’s heartbreaking unrequited love for Keira Knightley to the joyous giddy relationship between the Prime Minister (Hugh Grant, but again) and Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), this film about intertwining love tales is a holiday season should-see.

Quite a number of unforgettable love stories are in movies that don’t comfortably match the category (Gone with the Wind, for example), and the contemporary rom-com, while classifiably romantic, can appear as slight as the dandelion—a sunny flowering, a puffball dispersed on a breeze.

Romance is not the first thing you expect from a Wes Anderson film, but on this delightful Sixties-set tale, the American auteur employs all his regular tips – hip soundtrack, arch dialogue, super-careful manufacturing design – in the service of a story about the chaos and madness of young love.

From forbidden love, to falling in love with somebody out of your league, to the type of knee-trembling love that the best romance motion pictures do so well, we will not get enough of exhibiting all of the making up and breaking apart (and all of the drama, laughs and tears in between) in cinema.

Carol is essentially the most romantic movie of this century—there, I said it. In this 1950s-set melodrama about two women who fall in love with each other, director Todd Haynes shoots with such tenderness that it will take greater than only a single viewing to catch all of the intonations and hand touching that add up to the movie’s lingering romantic subtext.