Are Rom-Coms Back? Or Is On-Screen Love Too Cynical Now? Here’s What MIFF Curator Kate Jinx Thinks

Casablanca, You’ve Got Mail, Brokeback Mountain, La La Land. Film and TV has long been a medium where great love stories can take hold of our imagination. Just this year, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights hijacked the cultural conversation, Heated Rivalry and Off-Campus have found undeniable success, and rom-coms are back in the zeitgeist post-Voicemails for Isabelle on Netflix. Romance is clearly still alive and well on our screens.

But as modern love has increasingly become “a cruel endeavour”, how have audiences’ expectations for on-screen romance evolved?

“I think about this Weyes Blood song [Everyday] that came out in 2019, and she says, ‘True love is making a comeback,’” MIFF senior programmer Kate Jinx says. “It’s a song about dealing with modern romance and what that means; I suppose that is what we’re dealing with currently in the romantic sphere on screen, too.

“Do audiences really want a neat bow on things anymore? I think that our lives are so messy and complex – not to say that they haven’t always been – but I think people are maybe less wanting to be sold a fantasy.”

Romance is timeless, and Jinx rejects the idea that it ever really disappeared from the movies. But if there was a downturn, she thinks Celine Song’s 2023 debut feature, Past Lives, was a turning point for its resurgence. “A lot of people started talking about romantic films again when Past Lives came out,” she says. “And then when [Song’s follow-up 2025 feature] Materialists came out, that was a big cultural moment for contemporary romantic films.”

The latter film stars Dakota Johnson as a matchmaker with a pragmatic approach to love, and outlines a take on romance that Jinx says is “modern but quite cynical”.

She’s noticed similarly contemporary depictions of love and romance in several films screening at MIFF this year, particularly those in the Armani Beauty Cinema Club. The new program celebrates the Armani brand’s enduring connection to cinema, honouring the films that have shaped its legacy and the stars it has dressed – most famously Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo, a collaboration that marked a defining moment in the brand’s history. The line-up is a celebration of cinematic excellence – and, yes, love.

“Thinking about how romance is depicted on screen in 2026, and how that has potentially changed, one film that we have that really fits the bill is Wishful Thinking,” says Jinx. This debut feature from Graham Parks is the opening night film of the Armani Beauty Cinema Club, screening at The Capitol on Thursday August 13. It stars Maya Hawke (Stranger Things) and Lewis Pullman (Remarkably Bright Creatures, Thunderbolts) as a couple who start to believe that “the more in love they are and the more that they have these outward signs of affection for each other, [the more] they can control the universe”. She adds, “Ultimately, it’s a film about whether those outward displays of affection are really what the soul needs.”

Another film from the Armani Beauty Cinema Club program that comes at romance from a 2026 lens is Mile End Kicks, written and directed by Chandler Levack (I Like Movies) and starring Barbie Ferreira as a music journalist in 2011 Montreal. “It’s about [whether] you let romance sort of get in the way of your career ambitions.”

Jinx’s personal definition of what makes for a romantic film is also relatively contemporary, extending beyond genre tropes. “When I think of the big romantic films … they don’t end with the weddings,” she says.

Some of her favourite filmmakers, such as Eric Rohmer, provide a softer way of looking at the world. And Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 film La Chimera, “about a softly taciturn graverobber in ’80s Tuscany who is searching for his lost love while considering the beauty of hidden artistic treasure”, is what she considers “the most romantic film of the past decade”.

Jinx’s expansive view of romance in cinema also translates to a broader idea of what romance means in daily life. It’s not about being partnered up: “It’s a state of mind.”

The Armani Beauty Cinema Club is a new strand of specially curated films at MIFF, screening from August 6–23 across Melbourne and regional Victoria. Find the full program and book your tickets on miff.com.au.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Armani Beauty. Broadsheet is a proud media partner of the Melbourne International Film Festival.