For all its awkwardness and uncertainty, the film is a city symphony, romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure, and awed by the intellectual and poetic abstractions on which the great machine runs.

NEWYORKER: Margaret

The plaiting of fiction and personal documentary by now a classic mode of indie modernism lends extra poignancy and self-deprecation to the low-key romantic agonies and financial struggles of ambitious yet uncertain bohemians.

NEWYORKER: Open Five

Yet there's something deeply unsettling about Christian Grey being a romantic hero for contemporary women.

WSJ: Why 'Fifty Shades of Grey' Is a Best Seller | Dear Book Lover

Yet the lovers on the run, heading toward the wilderness, find no romantic liberation there, only the menacing ghosts of distant conflicts.

NEWYORKER: The Prowler

Harried, chased, both hunted and hunter, the blunt-nosed Matt Damon is a superhero reduced to pure reflex, yet, by means of his isolation and his stoicism, he becomes almost a romantic figure.

NEWYORKER: The Bourne Supremacy

Yet the rousing finish exalts another element of the will to freedom: the power of romantic love to loosen the bonds of indifferent institutions.

NEWYORKER: Moolaad��

In Paris, she violates yet another social rubric by falling in love with a married man, a well-read, clever romantic who is also a bit of a cad.

ECONOMIST: New fiction