We’ve had a string of older films — which is great — but today, I think we need something contemporary. With that in mind, Friday’s fine romance selection is Once, the 2006  indie about Dublin musicians directed by John Carney and starring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll warn you from the start that I simply can’t evaluate this film rationally. I love Ireland. I’ve been twice and would happily move there if it were an option. (Note to self: find job in Ireland.) I love Irish literature, I love Irish music, I love the way the rain in County Kerry tastes different from rain anywhere else on earth. I’ll even take Irish food if I get to eat it in Ireland. See: not rational.

I also went into Once a fan of Hansard’s music with The Frames, though I hadn’t heard any of his work with Irglova, a collaboration they call The Swell Season. (Hansard is really polarizing. My friends who are into Irish music much more so than me use him as a litmus test to figure out people’s taste.)

The story is easy enough: Hansard is a busker on Dublin’s streets. His dreams of making it big have been forestalled by helping with his aging father’s vacuum  repair business and by a woman who broke his heart and left him for London and another man. Irglova is a Czech immigrant who starts chatting and then playing music with him.

While the title (with it’s promise of “once upon a time”) might sound like it’s setting up something pretentious and grandiose, it’s difficult for me to think of a more direct, less fussy romance. It’s an organic thing — complicated by the fact that Hansard and Irglova are not actors and did in fact have an affair around the time the movie was shot.

But getting into what’s real and what’s not distracts from what’s amazing about Once: the music. There’s a reason it’s since been adapted for the Broadway stage. Irglova pacing through a Dublin night singing “If You Want Me” is a great tense moment that communicates so much about character and place, a successful fusion of music, lyrics, performance, and cinematic-ness. I write with The Swell Season playing in the background all the time. It’s smart, emotional, beautiful music.

See, I’m absolutely not rational. But that’s precisely why Once works, because it’s so damn evocative. Tonight, I commend Once to you, with or without the soda bread and Guinness.

It’s just another soggy Friday where I’m at, which requires something warm, tropical, and hilarious as a remedy. So today’s choice for a fine romance is Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 action-adventure-comedy-romance Romancing the Stone, starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.

Turner is a mousy, repressed, boring romance novelist, writing about things that’s she’s never experienced. (As we romance novelists do.) She receives word that her sister was kidnapped in South America and rushes to rescue her, only to end up lost in the Columbian jungle, where she meets Douglas. For a price, he agrees to help. What ensues is a grab-bag of action and romance cliches, somehow made fresh because everyone seems to be having so much fun.

I think it’s the fun that missing from contemporary romances. I guess because there’s so much capital tied up in making a movie today everyone is so serious. Romancing the Stone is winking at you — sometimes literally in the guise of Douglas’ joyous performance — and laughing with you.

If the rain keeps up, I’ll be able to reenact the mud slide scene in my backyard, hopefully with something rummy, and suggest you do the same. (Only perhaps minus the mud.)

Sometimes, I don’t need to over-think the romantic film recommendation thing. Sometime, the right selection is clear. And this week, I’m going with the obvious choice: Casablanca, Michael Curtiz’s 1942 masterpiece starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains.

If you haven’t seen it, you really should stop whatever you’re doing and track this film down. Like immediately. No, I’m not kidding.

But if you need more convincing, our setting is Morocco in the early days of World War II. Refugees are streaming out Europe only to end up trapped in purgatory-like Casablanca, unable to get out of the Vichy French-occupied (and thus German-aligned) territory without visas. Two such refugees are Bergman and Henreid. He’s a resistance leader and she’s his wife, a woman whose past with the bar-owner and hard-boiled cynic Bogart is at the center of the film.

Whether Casablanca is a romance or the true film equivalent of romance novel — meaning a courtship-focused narrative with a happily ever after — is an interesting question. (SPOILER ALERT) It ends happily from Henreid’s point-of-view and with the start of  “beautiful friendship” for Bogart and Rains. It also gave Bogart and Bergman closure. So the ending is ambiguous at worse and positive at best. (END SPOILERS) But even if the ending is atypical, it’s deeply romantic, often funny, and always smart.

I don’t believe that the cream rises to the top. The films that endure often stay around through a weird combination of marketing, nostalgia, academic interest, and serendipity. But in Casablanca’s case, the reputation and endurance is earned. I’ll be watching it tonight with some North African food and sangria.

With all that talk about the supermoon earlier this week, there was really only one choice for this week’s fine romance: Norman Jewison’s 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck. Yes, the one with Cher and Nicolas Cage.

It’s about a widow (Cher; yes, really) whose life is finally turning around. She’s engaged to a man who, while she doesn’t love him, is nice. When he goes to Sicily to be with his dying mother, she agrees to try to patch things over with his estranged brother (Cage). He, it turns out, is not nice at all, but not nice in that alpha, bad boy “my hand was cut off by a bread slicer” way (I’m still not making any of this up). They end up having a torrid affair and going to Lincoln Center to see La Boheme. As people do.

There are subplots involving Cher’s family, etc., but really, all I can say to recommend this film to you is that enjoying it is entirely about suspending your disbelief and letting your emotions sweep you away. It’s ridiculous and over-the-top and somehow, that’s precisely how it tells the truth.

If it’s not obvious, I really love Moonstruck. If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it in a while, my recommendation for tonight is Moonstruck, Chianti, Puccini, and many, many carbs.