What to watch this weekend: Special heart-bursting Valentine’s Day edition | Canada Voices

The Remains of the Day (Netflix)

Representing the pinnacle of stealth swooning, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson as two lost souls pulled together and apart in an aching kind of big-screen romance. Divided by social codes and restraints, Hopkins plays butler Mr. James Stevens to Thompson’s housekeeper Miss Sarah (Sally) Kenton, the two dancing around their proper “place” inside the home of English aristocracy circa the 1930s. Subtle and piercing, The Remains of the Day will have you clutching your heart for dear life, the palpitations increasing as Hopkins and Thompson slowly, carefully dial up their desires using only the corners of their eyes and the twitches of their mouths. These are masterful performances supported by the most loving, tender care of filmmakers who knew the pains of being pure at heart. At the risk of sounding cliché, they really just don’t make ‘em like this any more.

The Before Trilogy (Crave)

A grand cinematic experiment that was never supposed to go this far, Richard Linklater’s trio of Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy movies – 1995’s Before Sunrise, 2004’s Before Sunset, and 2013’s Before Midnight – represent the best kind of audacious cinematic risk-taking. Doubly so given that, for the series’ third and (perhaps final?) entry, Linklater and his two stars subverted expectations to give audiences a rather sour perspective into what happens to a couple once the romantic whirlwind dies down for a few beats to accommodate life’s more dispiriting and harder-to-embrace realities. Whatever you think, though, of how the trio ended things, there’s little argument to be made that the first two films following Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) feature Linklater and his actors at the very top of their games, balancing sincerity and sizzle with remarkable effect. Just don’t start the trilogy before you have to leave for any kind of important trip – baby, you are going to miss that plane.

Moonstruck (Prime Video, Crave)

A corker of a rom-com that kicks you in the head before kissing you on the mouth, Norman Jewison and John Patrick Shanley’s classic Moonstruck has only grown in its unparalleled charms since being unleashed into the world. Cher, at the very height of her on-screen powers, stars as a widowed bookkeeper who becomes the object of affection for the hot-tempered brother of her more staid fiancé – a love triangle of sorts in which the tone is set to screwball and the temperature so high that no amount of mercury could be trusted to measure it. Nicolas Cage is perfectly erratic as the maniacal brother, and the entire production is propelled by such a zippy, cockeyed, ready-to-levitate energy that you might finish the film with your feet a few feet off the ground. Snap out of it!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Hollywood Suite)

You can’t truly know love unless you’ve lost it once or twice (or more times), which is why Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s 2004 epic is both a head-trip and a heartache. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet star as two people at once perfect and totally wrong for each other, which leads to some experimental high-tech cognitive science that feels just around the corner from now. Part comedy about falling down the rabbit hole of memory and part mournful tragedy about humanity’s tendency to let the best things in our lives slip away with ease, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind might be one of the best films to actually earn its dorm-room poster placement circa the early aughts. And rewatching it today is a stark reminder that Carrey continues to be wasted by limiting his on-screen work to the Sonic the Hedgehog movies.

Platonic (Apple TV+)

Finally, not all love stories need to be told within the context of romantic relationships, as the overlooked 2023 series Platonic proves. Starring Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, who have already played husband and wife twice (in Nicholas Stoller’s pair of Neighbors movies), the 10-episode half-hour series follows two friends from college whose lives have drifted apart since taking on – or shrugging off – the burdens of adulthood. Sylvia (Byrne) is a loving mother of three, tucked away in a cramped Los Angeles house and itching to get back into the legal field, which she abandoned in favour of helping her stupidly handsome and kind husband Charlie (Luke Macfarlane) advance his own career. Will (Rogen) sits on the opposite end of things, single and relatively carefree after recently going through a divorce, his only responsibility tending to the tanks at the hipster-cool bar where he’s brewmaster. The pair reconnect after Sylvia notices an Instagram post from his ex, and from there proceed to rekindle – and then frequently disrupt – their friendship.

As with many Judd Apatow-adjacent projects, the story here isn’t so much the thing as the vibe, as witty as it is warm. The predicaments that Will and Sylvia find themselves in – various low-stakes incidents and arguments and reconciliations – are all executed as merely an excuse for the performers to flex their scarily strong comedic muscles, and bask in the glow of each other’s extremely lovable, huggable personas. The series’ barely there conceit – that Will and Sylvia are constantly mistaken for husband and wife, but have almost no interest in pursuing such a relationship – works because the performers are so naturally loose and comfortable with one another. You’ll easily fall in love with both of them, platonically or otherwise.