Movie Pairings From Fairytale To Familiar

Relationships have their downs as well as ups, that we all know, but it’s been a while since a movie presented that particular truth with as little gloss and varnish as Blue Valentine. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling are our guides through the ultimate screen woemance: a couple we see falling in, then, brutally, out of love. It’s a horror movie for any young couple, mainly because it feels so real. The pair don’t try to kill each other War Of The Rose-style, or go all Mr. And Mrs. Smith on us, but their love unravels before your eyes. So where does Blue Valentine rate on the spectrum of authentic movie relationships? Here’s a handy sliding scale of some landmark movie romances rated on realism rather than pure romance. Warning: no Casablanca included.

Another Year (2010)**

If you come out of Blue Valentine feeling a bit bereft, you might find solace in Another Year's Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a married couple who've sailed through the tough times to emerge contented into calmer waters. They potter about on their allotment, lend an ear to their boozy, shrilly troubled friend (Lesley Manville), take pride in their underachieving son, set the world to rights together and find music in comfortable silences. See, it is possible. To the garden centre!

Don't Look Now (1973)**

Heartbreak runs through Nic Roeg's psych-horror just like that little red-coated dwarf. The threads of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie's marriage come apart before our eyes, as they head to Venice to try to escape their grief for their daughter's drowning only to find a chasm opening between them. It feels so real - that erotic/mundane sex scene remains a template for just about every director out there - that if their anguished attempts to reconnect don't move you, you're probably a tiny Venetian dwarf.

**Before Sunrise / Before Sunset (1995/2004) **

Though the way Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet – bonding over an irritating arguing couple on the train, then deciding to go on a trip around Vienna before Jesse returns to America – might be somewhat far-fetched, the relationship itself isn’t. Hawke and Delpy have a natural, beautiful chemistry, bouncing ideas off each other and thinking the big thoughts without ever seeming fake or insincere. This is a fantastic achievement considering it's a film that's essentially a couple of twenty-somethings waffling on about the meaning of love, life, and happiness around some Austrian backstreets for an hour and a half. But even better than Before Sunrise – yes, we went there – is Before Sunset. It’s a simple, exquisite film, written in part by Hawk ane Delpy themselves, and definitive proof that the delayed sequel of a much-loved original can work – if only thanks to the sheer believability of the couple’s romance.

(500) Days Of Summer (2009)**

What boy can resist a quirky, slightly unknowable, Smiths-loving girl? And what boy, having snared said girl, can stop himself mucking it all up by putting her on a pedestal, getting jealous of the attentions of other boys and generally getting dumped? The moping, the heartache, the unusually precocious little sister on hand with gems of middle-aged good sense: we can relate to all of it (maybe not the precocious sister). Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel play this genre-subverting love affair to perfection, even squeezing in that rite of passage of all good relationships: the trip to IKEA.

Revolutionary Road (2009)**

After Blue Valentine, Sam Mendes’ relationship melodrama will probably play more like a wistful romantic comedy, but it’s still an unsparingly forensic exploration of an imploding marriage. The Wheelers, Frank (Leonard DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet), have lots in common with Blue Valentine’s Dean and Cindy, from unfulfilled dreams to silently suffering children. Unlike Dean and Cindy, they have Michael Shannon’s say-it-like-it-is savant on hand to tell them where they’re going wrong. Before you can say Kramer Vs. Kramer, it’s all gone heartbreakingly south for Connecticut’s unhappiest couple. And they never even had Paris.

Kramer Vs Kramer (1979)**

This list isn't all heartbreak and recrimination (we promise), but Hollywood does have an uncanny knack of nailing break-ups with more realism than it brings to bear with those happier or more sugary endings. Exhibit one is this grimly authentic courtroom battle, in which Dustin Hoffman slugs it out blow by ugly blow with his ex, played by Meryl Streep, for custody of their son. You can see how their marriage turned toxic, you can understand the mix of scarred anger and confused love that drives their custody battle and you can empathise with them both in a melodrama that director Robert Benton keeps painfully real.

Brief Encounter (1945)**

This classic, none-more-English romance shows a side of married life often seen on the big screen but rarely done justice. Neither Celia Johnson's housewife nor Trevor Howard's GP are unhappy in their marriages, just not especially happy either. Both yearn for more - more spark, more connection, more anything - but know that, with a kids and another half at home, they're left with an impossible choice between different kinds of love. The path of true love doesn't run smooth - or, in this case, at all. An Affair To Remember had a happier ending, but this remains the high-water mark in painfully honest, heartbreaking screen romances.

The Graduate (1967)**

As any fool knows, there are better ways to win a girl's heart than sleeping with her mum, taking her to strips clubs and then stalking her around her own campus. Flowers would be a start. Benjamin Braddock, though, is not just any fool. His naiveté - sometimes endearing, sometimes eye-poppingly selfish - lands him in a mess that threatens to ruin his adult life before it's even got started. Somehow, with the help of some seriously advanced survival instincts and a defiant streak the size of the East River, he makes off with the girl, Elaine Robinson, who he thinks he's in love with. But is he? And is she running away with him or from something else? Mike Nichol's classic lays bare many of the complexities of love and life, and throws in an iconic ending for good measure.

Away We Go (2009)**

Are Burt and Verona, the kooky couple at the heart of Sam Mendes' romantic-comedy, the optimistic antidote to the jagged anguish of Blue Valentine's Cindy and Dean or just Cindy and Dean five years before? We're going for the former. They wash gently through the lives of older couples whose lives are in various states of repair/disrepair, showing a love and commitment that seems pretty steely. Will they survive the tougher times? The fact that we're even asking the question immediately elevates Away We Go up above most movie marriages and up five places on this chart. It wins another place for Maggie Gyllenhaal's brilliantly daffy, pram-hating, new-age mum ("I LOVE my babies. Why would I want to push them away from me?").

When Harry Met Sally (1989)**

Over 12 years or so, Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) try - and ultimately fail - to defy the rules of attraction. "Men and women can't be friends," he informs her, "because the sex part always gets in the way". She giggles and assumes he's mad. Which he is, because, c'mon, 12 years?? Just shag each other and get it out of your systems already.

A Star Is Born (1954)**

Not many musicals score highly for grittily realistic romances - all those high-kicking chorus line numbers get in the way - but Norman Maine (James Mason) and Vicki Lester's (Judy Garland) tender love affair is a noble exception. There's as much 'worse' as 'better' in their marriage. After helping her to stardom, he sees his own career disappear down the plughole and lapses into a volatile, booze-fuelled depression. But Vicki stands by him with fierce loyalty and even threatens to quit to nurse him back to health. A tale of Hollywood romance that feels real, partly because it is: Garland and Mason fell in love on the set of the movie.

The Lady Eve (1941)**

A classic screwball probably isn't the place to go for realism, but amid all the high farce and shipboard con-artistry, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda's couple exude such easy chemistry that they earn Preston Sturges' sparkling romance a spot in midtable. Opposites do attract and they don't come much more opposite than the sharp-witted guile of Stanwyck and the trusting, snake-fixated Fonda. We're not sure we buy the bit where she goes away and comes back in the kind of disguise Baldrick would see through, but, like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happening One Night, the pair's blossoming love is easily enchanting enough to mask all the capering.

My Best Friend's Wedding (1997)**

One of the best examples of that hoary Hollywood notion that women will do literally anything for love. Lie, cheat, deceive, backstab: you name it, Julia Roberts’ foodie does it. She pursues college buddy/secret crush Dermot Mulroney with all the trustworthy ethics of Satan himself. Still, beneath all the psychosis – and we know she’s psychotic; she smokes cigarettes – she does kinda have a point. Mulroney and Cameron Diaz’s college grad are the least well-matched movie couple since Godzilla and Toyko town centre. She’s ditzy; he’s blandly nice. She’s so eager to please she actually asks this crazed, relationship-breaking harpie to be her bridesmaid; he forgets to ask why she doesn’t have any of her own friends to do it. This relationship has all the spark of a soggy matchbox.

The Last Song (2010)**

This teen romance is set in the hermetically-sealed Nicholas Sparks World, so any gritty realism is bound to be offset with glossy sunsets and hatching sea turtles. But even for a summer fling, Ronnie (Miley Cyrus) and Will (Liam Hemsworth) are fooling nobody with their scuba diving and mooning-at-one-another antics. There's precious little chemistry, while his uber-wealthy parents feel like snobby caricatures designed specifically to engineer a fall-out between them from which they will eventually kiss and make up. If there are any realistic characters in the movie, it's actually Ronnie's respectfully estranged mum and dad, Greg Kinnear and Kelly Preston. Them and the sea turtles.

Indecent Proposal (1993)**

You'd let your other half sleep with someone else for cashola? And Robert Redford needs to pay for sex? What goes in this movie only happens in two places: the left and right halves of Adrian Lyne's brain.

Twilight (2008)**

One of you is a vampire with amazing hair; one of you wants to be a vampire and is too sad about it to spend much time worrying about stuff like hair care. You've got a mate who's a wolf and My Chemical Romance the Volturi are trying to kill you. If you can tick all/any of these boxes, congratulations, you're in the ultimate emo love affair. If you can't, join the club.

Ghost (1990)**

Losing the love of your life is an experience so horrific that there's absolutely no consolation to be found. And this definitely includes sexy pottery with Whoopi Goldberg.

King Kong (1933)**

This falls down on the first rule of romance: never go out with anyone with fleas bigger than you.