Love Story

MARION COTILLARD has been working as an actress since she was a teenager, but it was her Oscar-winning performance as Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" that brought her to the attention of American audiences - and Hollywood filmmakers. Since then she's worked with directors such as Michael Mann ("Public Enemies"), Woody Allen ("Midnight in Paris"), Steven Soderbergh ("Contagion") and Christopher Nolan ("Inception," "The Dark Knight Rises"). In "Rust and Bone," she returns to France for an intimate relationship movie about a whale trainer and the fighter who sort of nurses her back to health after an accident at the Sea World-like water show where she works.

There is a terribly affecting quality about "The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love," Maria Maggenti's auspicious film debut. Despite its provocative themes, it represents teen screen romance at its best. Flawed acting and imprecise editing actually add to the charm of this delicate love story. Randy (Laurel Holloman), a grungy, tomboyish loner and Evie (Nicole Parker), a prissy, popular girl, meet at the gas station where Randy works. Their differences are startling.

Diva offers flashy, winning and totally unpredictable proof that a French connection can exist between the opera stage and the underworld. Part police thriller, part offbeat love story - between a diva (Wilhelmenia Fernandez) and a smitten postal worker - it keeps the viewer off balance with its dash and many surprises. Diva is a tale of two tapes. One records the voice of a prima donna and the other the last words of a murdered prostitute that could incriminate various powerful figures.

A passionate romance set against the background of a war that puts the lovers at the mercy of great events beyond their control is an almost surefire theme that has drawn filmmakers from Casablanca to The Year of Living Dangerously. But even in a crowded and much-traveled field, Max Farberbock's Aimee and Jaguar is a standout. The sheer improbability of the lesbian relationship between Lilly (Juliane Kohler), a loyal and upright German officer's wife, and Felice (Maria Schrader)

About 20 years ago, filmmaker Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton adapted the novel Dangerous Liaisons . From Choderos de Laclos' defining document of 18th-century French literature, they spun a movie that brilliantly contrasted the cynics, who play love as a sport, against the romantics, visibly elevated by the union of two souls. Lightning does not strike again with Chéri . Frears and Hampton's version of Colette's heartrending novels - Chéri and The Return of Chéri - about a young man initiated by an older woman in the teens of the 20th century is surprisingly flat.

It's hard to imagine a better production of Philip Dawkins' lovely, bittersweet play Failure: A Love Story . Directed with great delicacy and imagination by Allison Heishman for Azuka Theatre, it is a triumph for this superb cast of young actors, some working professionally for the first time. The plot would be a straightforward one about falling in love if it were told forwardly, but since it's all flashback, and since it takes place in the 1920s, and since it's set in a clock shop, the Fail family's business, it's really about time, and how, when you're remembering, the past seems to be present, just as it does onstage.

This challenging, inventive movie from Thailand is not for everyone. It's a beautifully made love story that abruptly switches, halfway through, from a sweet, budding romance between a male soldier and a giggly country boy to a feverish jungle fable that pretty much shows what it's like when the tropical malady of love is unleashed in the blood. Both halves are really the same story, but the first shows an everyday, rather chaste courtship, while the second uses Thai folk traditions - the soldier stalks a mythical, shape-shifting creature - to plunge you into a world where behind every twisted tree branch lies death or transcendence.

Planet Earth is a dump. Literally. In the 28th century, the human race has fled to space, and apart from a few cockroaches, there are no life forms to speak of, just empty metropolises, abandoned ultra-malls and mountains of debris festering in the toxic haze of a long-ago environmental meltdown. What's a lonely robot to do? Well, in WALLE , the little rusted box with the binocular face and tank treads for feet falls in love, that's what. An adventurous shift away from the anthropomorphic madcappery of Pixar's recent animated features, WALLE , directed by Finding Nemo and Ratatouille veteran Andrew Stanton, is part love story, part eco-cautionary tale, and, for its first half, pretty much devoid of human dialogue.

Love is a never-ending story for Nicholas Sparks. It was love that put two of his novels, The Notebook and Message in a Bottle, on the best-seller lists, and will likely put his just-released A Walk to Remember (Warner Books, $19.95) there as well. And the love in those books has all been inspired by either his or his wife's relatives. The Notebook was inspired by the vibrant love after 60 years of marriage that he witnessed between his wife's grandparents when he and his bride visited them in their wedding clothes the day after their nuptials.