MeloMovie

How MeloMovie works

The page is the colour of the sky an hour after sunset, a deep midnight blue, with headings and buttons in bright cyan. The bar at the top carries the name, the menu and a search field. The menu reads: Top TV-Series, Top Movie, Romance, Drama, True stories, Music, Top rated, the A-Z index and My List. The link for the page you are on is underlined in cyan.

The home page opens with a wide still from one featured series. Over its lower edge are the title in cyan, a line listing the genres, the rating on a small orange badge, a few lines of summary and a button marked Details. Below the still come six rows of posters: Top Movie and Top TV-Series with twelve titles each, then Romance, True stories, Music and Period series with six. Each poster shows the year at the lower left and the rating on an orange badge at the lower right, with the title beneath. A title appears once on the page, and the link beside each heading opens the full list.

A title page is laid out the same way for a film or a series. At the top are the poster, the title, the year, the genres and the rating out of ten. A summary follows, then the director or creators and the leading cast, each name a link to that person's other titles on MeloMovie. A series page continues with every season and every episode, each with its title and original air date. The cyan Watch now button stands beside a menu of fifteen countries. Choose yours, press, and JustWatch opens with the subscription, rental, purchase and free services that carry the title there. MeloMovie recommends; the services play.

The search field accepts titles, people and years, and for a series it understands a season and episode number after the title. Type Julia Roberts and five films appear. Type Hugh Grant and you receive five. The page on finding titles lists every route into the catalogue, and the My List page explains the personal shortlist kept in your own browser.

Romance

Seventy-five films are love stories, and the list begins with two that are made almost entirely of talk. In Before Sunrise, an American travelling through Europe and a French student going home to Paris fall into conversation on a train and decide, on impulse, to get off together in Vienna. They have until dawn. They walk, they argue about everything, they listen to a record in a booth too small for two people to avoid each other's eyes. Nine years later, in Before Sunset, they meet again in a Paris bookshop with one hour to spare. Richard Linklater directed both, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy play the pair, and the films are rated 8.0 and 7.8.

Time is a favourite subject of the modern love story. One Day visits Emma and Dexter on the fifteenth of July each year for two decades, as friendship ripens slowly into something more. Past Lives, the most recent romance on the list and one of the most admired, follows two childhood sweethearts from Seoul who are parted at twelve and meet again as adults in New York; it says a great deal with glances and silences. The Best of Me and The Longest Ride, both from novels by Nicholas Sparks, bring former lovers back to the places where they first met.

First love has a tender film in Flipped, rated 8.0, which tells the same childhood romance twice, once from the boy's side of the street and once from the girl's. Everything, Everything is about a girl who has spent her whole life indoors and the boy who moves in next door. The teenage romances that found huge audiences on streaming services are here in full: all three films that begin with To All the Boys I've Loved Before, and all three of The Kissing Booth.

Love later in life is treated with equal warmth. Up in the Air gives George Clooney a man who has made a home of airports and begins to wonder what he has missed. The Holiday sends two women across the Atlantic to each other's houses for a fortnight. Eat Pray Love follows a writer through Italy, India and Bali after a divorce, and Far from the Madding Crowd sets Thomas Hardy's independent heroine among three suitors in the fields of Dorset. The romance guide sorts the list by mood.

Romantic comedy

Fifty-four of the love stories are also comedies, and the best of them came from London in the 1990s. Four Weddings and a Funeral introduced the world to Hugh Grant's stammering charm and to a circle of friends who seem to spend every Saturday in morning dress. Notting Hill, five years later, put him behind the counter of a travel bookshop and sent Julia Roberts, as the most famous film star in the world, through the door. The scene in which she stands in the shop and describes herself as simply a girl standing in front of a boy is one of the most quoted in modern cinema. Grant appears again in About a Boy, Music and Lyrics and Florence Foster Jenkins.

America answered in kind. While You Were Sleeping is the gentlest of comedies about a lonely woman adopted by a family under a misunderstanding. My Best Friend's Wedding and Runaway Bride both star Julia Roberts at her most winning; Serendipity trusts a meeting to fate; Hitch stars Will Smith as a consultant who teaches shy men how to make a good first impression. Sweet Home Alabama, The Wedding Planner, Maid in Manhattan, 27 Dresses and Life As We Know It carried the genre through the following decade, and Crazy Rich Asians gave it a glittering new setting in Singapore.

The streaming era has kept the form alive with films such as Love Hard, in which a journalist flies across the country to surprise a man she met online and finds he looks rather different from his photograph, Falling Inn Love and The Perfect Date. The romantic comedy guide arranges the list by city, and the weddings guide gathers the films with a ceremony at their centre.

Drama

Seventy-two films carry the Drama label, and the finest are about families. CODA, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, is the story of Ruby, a seventeen-year-old in a fishing town in Massachusetts and the only hearing member of her family. She interprets for her parents and brother on the boat and at the doctor's, and she loves to sing, a gift that lies beyond their hearing. The film is funny and frank about family life, and the scene in which her father places his hands on her throat to feel her voice has moved audiences everywhere. It is rated 7.9.

I Am Sam follows a father with an intellectual disability who fights to keep the daughter he has raised with love and Beatles songs. Belfast is Kenneth Branagh's memory of a childhood interrupted by the troubles of 1969, seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old who adores his grandparents. Little Miss Sunshine packs a family of six into a yellow van, and Pay It Forward imagines a schoolboy whose plan for doing good spreads from one stranger to the next.

A second group of dramas is about ambition and what it costs. The Social Network is the most watched film on MeloMovie, a rapid, brilliantly written account of the founding of a website and the ending of a friendship. The Founder tells how a persistent salesman built a restaurant empire on another family's idea. Steve Jobs, Jobs and Joy are portraits of inventors, Moneyball of a baseball manager who trusted numbers, and Air of the afternoon a shoe company bet everything on a young basketball player.

Journeys supply the third. In Lion, rated 8.0, a small boy is carried a thousand miles from his village by a train and, grown to manhood in another country, sets out to find his way back. The Terminal strands a traveller in an airport for months and lets him make a community of it. The Way Way Back and The Kings of Summer are about boys finding their feet in a single summer, and The Art of Racing in the Rain, the highest rated film on the list at 8.1, tells a racing driver's life from the point of view of his devoted dog. The drama guide groups the list by theme.

True stories

Twenty-four films are drawn from real lives, and they give the catalogue much of its weight. A Beautiful Mind, rated 7.9, follows the mathematician John Nash from his student days through the illness that nearly destroyed him and the marriage that saw him through. The Man Who Knew Infinity brings the self-taught Indian genius Ramanujan to Cambridge. Hitchcock looks over the shoulder of a famous director and his wife during the making of his best-known film, and Big Eyes tells of a painter whose husband signed her work.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, rated 7.9, is the story of William Kamkwamba, a schoolboy in Malawi who taught himself engineering from a library book and built a windmill to save his village's harvest. King Richard is a portrait of the father who coached two daughters from the public courts of Compton to the summit of world tennis. The Upside is about a wealthy man who has lost the use of his limbs and the unlikely assistant who gets him laughing again, and Julie & Julia moves between a great cook in 1950s Paris and a young writer in New York who sets out to make every recipe in her book.

True stories are at their best when they send you to find out more, and each of these does. The true stories guide arranges them by subject.

Music

Twenty-six films are about singers, bands and dancers. Four are biographies. Ray follows Ray Charles through thirty years of music; Selena, rated 7.7, celebrates the Texan star who was adored on both sides of the border; Elvis is Baz Luhrmann's whirl through the life of the king of rock and roll; and A Complete Unknown, the newest film on MeloMovie, watches a young Bob Dylan arrive in New York with a guitar and change popular music in four years.

Others are about ordinary people who find a voice. Sing Street, rated 7.9, is set in Dublin in 1985, where a schoolboy starts a band to impress a girl and discovers that he can write songs. tick, tick... BOOM! is the story of a young composer racing to finish a musical. Florence Foster Jenkins is the true tale of an heiress who loved to sing far more than she was able to, and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga sends two Icelandic friends to the world's most colourful song competition.

For singing along there are the two films of Mamma Mia! and two of the Pitch Perfect 2 series; for dancing, Step Up 3D, Step Up All In, Work It, Feel the Beat and the 2011 Footloose. The Wedding Singer and Music and Lyrics wrap romantic comedies around pop songs of the eighties. The music guide has the full playlist.

The series

The sixty-two series are the long-form half of MeloMovie, and they offer something beyond the reach of a film: time. A viewer can live in Stars Hollow for seven years, or follow a Yorkshire vet through the seasons, and come to know the characters as neighbours. The most watched series on the site is The Good Doctor, rated 8.5, in which a young surgeon with autism and a remarkable gift for seeing what others miss joins the staff of a California hospital. Across 126 episodes the series is as much about his colleagues learning from him as about the cases they treat.

Gilmore Girls is the heart of the list for many viewers. Lorelai, who had her daughter at sixteen, and Rory, who is now that age herself, are best friends, rivals at fast talking and joint citizens of a Connecticut town where everyone knows everyone's business. Its 153 episodes are as comforting as a favourite jumper. The West Wing, rated 8.3, follows a president and his staff through seven seasons of crises and principle, and Friday Night Lights makes a Texas football town the setting for one of television's best portraits of a marriage.

Shorter series are just as rewarding. Freaks and Geeks tells the truth about high school in eighteen episodes. Derry Girls finds uproarious comedy in a Northern Irish convent school in the 1990s. Dash & Lily is a New York romance conducted through a notebook left on a bookshop shelf, Spinning Out is set among competitive figure skaters, and From the Earth to the Moon recounts the Apollo programme in twelve parts. The series guide offers a first choice of each kind.

Period series

Thirteen series are costume dramas, and they are among the highest rated titles on MeloMovie. Downton Abbey, rated 8.1, follows the family and servants of a great Yorkshire house from the spring of 1912 through war, loss and the changing world of the 1920s. Its creator, Julian Fellowes, later wrote The Gilded Age, which does the same for the mansions of New York in the 1880s, where old families and new fortunes compete for the best box at the opera.

The classic novels are superbly served. The 1995 Pride and Prejudice, in six episodes with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, is still the version every other is measured against and is rated 8.2. North & South, rated 8.1, sets a proud young woman from the rural south of England against a mill owner in the industrial north. Jane Eyre gives Charlotte Brontë's governess four episodes, Sanditon completes Jane Austen's unfinished seaside novel, and The Paradise is set in a glittering department store. Victoria dramatises the first years of a young queen's reign.

For lighter moments there are Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie as the amiable young gentleman and Stephen Fry as the valet who rescues him weekly, and Lost in Austen, in which a modern reader changes places with Elizabeth Bennet. The period series guide lists all thirteen.

Small-town and country series

A cherished kind of series is set far from the city, in a place where the pace is slower and the neighbours take an interest. All Creatures Great & Small, rated 8.2, adapts the memoirs of a young vet who arrives in the Yorkshire Dales in 1937 to work for an eccentric senior partner; the landscapes are glorious and the animals steal every scene. When Calls the Heart, rated 8.3, follows a teacher from a wealthy family to a coal-mining town in the Canadian west and has run for thirteen seasons. Little House on the Prairie is the grandparent of them all, two hundred episodes of pioneer life in Minnesota.

In Hart of Dixie, a New York doctor inherits a practice in a small Alabama town with a festival for every weekend. Northern Exposure sends another to a village in Alaska where the radio host quotes philosophers and a moose wanders down the main street. Sweet Magnolias and Chesapeake Shores are stories of friendship and family in the American South and on the Maryland coast. The small-town series guide has the list.

Growing up on screen

Many of the series, and a good number of the films, are about young people, and they are a pleasure to watch across the generations. The Wonder Years, rated 8.3, looks back from adulthood on a suburban boyhood at the end of the 1960s. Boy Meets World, also 8.3, follows its hero from the sixth form of primary school to marriage, with the same wise teacher living next door throughout. That '70s Show spends eight seasons in a Wisconsin basement.

More recent series are gentle and good-hearted. Andi Mack, The Baby-Sitters Club, Geek Girl, Free Rein and Big Shot are all rated 7.9 or thereabouts and suit viewers from ten upward. My Life with the Walter Boys moves a New York teenager to a Colorado ranch with ten brothers, and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series follows the pupils of a real school staging a famous show.

The films on the same theme include Eighth Grade, an honest and kind portrait of a shy thirteen-year-old; Lemonade Mouth, about a band formed in detention; The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; and Whip It, in which a small-town girl finds her nerve in a roller derby league. The young love guide pairs films and series.

From the bookshelf

Thirty-seven titles began as books, which is a good sign in a catalogue devoted to character and feeling. The period series speak for themselves. Among the films, One Day, About a Boy, Water for Elephants, Everything, Everything and Crazy Rich Asians were all bestselling novels. Lion, Eat Pray Love and Julie & Julia come from memoirs, The Social Network and Moneyball from works of reporting, and The Hundred-Foot Journey, about an Indian family who open a restaurant across the road from a celebrated French one, from a novel that food lovers pass from hand to hand.

On television, Little House on the Prairie, All Creatures Great & Small, The Baby-Sitters Club, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Sweet Magnolias and Dash & Lily all have books behind them. Reading the book before or after watching doubles the pleasure, and it is a good way to draw a reluctant reader in. The guide to titles from the bookshelf lists the sources.

Faces to follow

A catalogue of romance and drama naturally has its favourite performers. Julia Roberts leads five films, and her smile could serve as the emblem of the whole list: Notting Hill, My Best Friend's Wedding, Runaway Bride, Eat Pray Love and Larry Crowne; she is also among the ensemble of Valentine's Day. Hugh Grant has five films as well. Amy Adams, Anna Kendrick, Jennifer Lopez and Reese Witherspoon each appear several times, and the young stars of the streaming romances, Lana Condor, Noah Centineo and Joey King, have three or more apiece.

Among directors, Richard Linklater, Nancy Meyers, Garry Marshall and Vince Marcello each have two or more films. Nancy Meyers, who made What Women Want and The Holiday, is known for kitchens that viewers long to cook in. On television, Julian Fellowes wrote both great-house sagas, and Andrew Davies adapted Pride and Prejudice and Sanditon. Every name on a title page is a link, so one favourite soon leads to another.

Weddings on film

A wedding is a gift to a storyteller. It gathers every relative in one place, sets a deadline, and guarantees that somebody will say the wrong thing. A good ten films on MeloMovie make the most of it. Father of the Bride, the oldest film in the catalogue, sees the whole business from the point of view of a father, played by Steve Martin, who is losing his daughter and gaining a bill. My Big Fat Greek Wedding introduces a quiet groom to a bride's family of several dozen opinionated relatives and one very large lamb, and its sequel is here too.

The Wedding Planner casts Jennifer Lopez as an organiser who can solve every problem but her own. 27 Dresses is about the friend who has stood beside twenty-seven brides. Bride Wars turns lifelong friends into rivals over a hotel booking, The Wedding Date hires an escort for a sister's ceremony in London, and You Again brings old school enemies together as future in-laws. In Crazy Rich Asians, the wedding of the year in Singapore is the backdrop for a contest between a determined mother and her son's sweetheart, with a ceremony in which the aisle becomes a stream.

The British films use weddings as a calendar. Four Weddings and a Funeral measures out a romance in five gatherings, each with its own disaster, and the series Downton Abbey marks nearly every season with one. For the people who provide the music, see The Wedding Singer.

Parents and children

The deepest feeling in the catalogue often flows between generations. Fathers and daughters are at the centre of CODA, I Am Sam, King Richard and Jersey Girl, in which a widowed father swaps a Manhattan career for a small town and a seven-year-old's school play. Trouble with the Curve sends a daughter on the road with her father, an ageing baseball scout too proud to admit his eyes are failing, and the two repair in a week what years had worn down.

Mothers are just as vivid. The heroine of Lion has two, one who lost him and one who raised him, and the film honours both. The Family Stone gathers a large New England family around a mother who knows it may be her last holiday with them all. On television, Gilmore Girls is a study of three generations of women under one surname, and Little House on the Prairie and The Wonder Years are told by grown children looking back on parents they understand better with age.

Grandparents, guardians and teachers stand in when parents are absent: the grandfather of Belfast, the water-park manager of The Way Way Back, the grandfather of Free Rein, the hospital mentor of The Good Doctor. Stories like these are a large part of why the catalogue suits watching together.

Friendship

Romance takes the headlines, but friendship does much of the work. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants follows four girls through their first summer apart, joined by a pair of jeans that passes between them by post. Little Miss Sunshine is at heart about an uncle and a nephew who learn to speak to each other. The Upside is the story of an employer and an assistant who become each other's best company, and The Hundred-Foot Journey of two cooks from different traditions who end by sharing a kitchen.

The series are built on it. The four friends of Sweet Magnolias meet weekly to set the world to rights. Derry Girls has five schoolmates who get into every kind of scrape together and out of very few. Freaks and Geeks and Boy Meets World know that the friends made at fourteen are the ones remembered for life, and The Baby-Sitters Club turns a group of friends into a small business.

Love and work

A good many of the films are set where people spend their days, and they have aged into a record of working life. Morning Glory takes place in the chaos of a breakfast television studio. Up in the Air is about a man whose job is to fly from city to city, and what the road has kept from him. Second Act gives a supermarket assistant manager with twenty years of experience the chance to show what she can do in a boardroom, and Larry Crowne sends a man back to college in middle age.

The Nanny Diaries and Maid in Manhattan look at the city from the side of those who keep it running, and What Women Want and Hitch find comedy in the business of persuasion. On television, the White House of The West Wing, the hospital of The Good Doctor, the airport of Wings, the fashion magazine of Ugly Betty and the resort of Acapulco are workplaces that become families, which is perhaps the oldest plot of all.

Films for the holidays

The end of the year brings its own kind of romance, and MeloMovie keeps a handful ready. The Holiday is the modern classic: two cottages, two heartbreaks, one snowy English lane. Love Hard and The Knight Before Christmas, in which a medieval knight is transported to a small Ohio town in December, are light and bright. Four Christmases and The Family Stone are about going home, with all the comedy and feeling that involves, and While You Were Sleeping unfolds between Christmas and the New Year in a wintry Chicago.

The series Dash & Lily belongs here too: eight episodes set in New York in the last week of December, with a red notebook, a bookshop and a great deal of fairy lights. Search for the word Christmas in any month and the list appears.

Series beyond romance

The series list reaches a little further than the films, and viewers looking for a change of pace will find it. A group of gentle adventure shows sits among the dramas. Quantum Leap, rated 8.0, sends a scientist leaping through time to put right small injustices in other people's lives, and is one of the most humane programmes ever made. Eureka and Warehouse 13 are light-hearted mysteries set in a town of inventors and a storehouse of curiosities. Merlin retells the legend of Camelot for a family audience, and The Librarians and The Mysterious Benedict Society are adventures with brains.

For younger viewers there are two Australian favourites, H2O: Just Add Water and Mako: Island of Secrets, and a shelf of family comedies that includes Liv and Maddie, Austin & Ally and Raven's Home. Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist gives a young programmer the power to hear what the people around her feel, in the form of songs, and Away follows an astronaut and the family she leaves behind for three years.

A few older comedies with a serious side round out the list: Taxi, The Facts of Life, Wings and Doogie Howser, M.D., whose teenage doctor typed his thoughts into a journal at the end of each episode. They are included because, beneath the laughter, each is about people looking after one another, and that is the thread on which the whole catalogue is strung.

Where the stories take you

Part of the charm of these films is their sense of place. London is everywhere: the market streets of Notting Hill, the churches of the wedding comedy, the embankment walks of About a Boy. Paris belongs to Before Sunset and Julie & Julia, Rome to To Rome with Love, Vienna to Before Sunrise, and a Greek island to the two musicals built on Swedish pop. Edinburgh rises behind the first meeting in One Day.

New York is the capital of the romantic comedy, seen in snow in Serendipity and in summer in Hitch. Chicago, Alabama and the coast of North Carolina all have their films, and Falling Inn Love and Lion travel to New Zealand and Tasmania. On television the settings are just as much a part of the story: the Dales, the Canadian frontier, a Connecticut village green, the corridors of power in Washington. A viewer can choose an evening by destination as easily as by plot.

Sport with a heart

Sport and melodrama are old partners, because a match supplies exactly what a story needs: a goal, a clock and somebody to cheer for. Wimbledon sets a love story on the grass courts of the famous tournament, where a fading British player finds his form the moment he falls for a rising American star. Whip It takes a small-town Texas teenager into the world of roller derby, and Trouble with the Curve spends a week among baseball scouts in the minor-league parks of the South.

The true stories go deeper. King Richard follows the father who wrote a plan for two tennis champions before they were born, and Moneyball the general manager who rebuilt a baseball team with arithmetic. Air tells how a shoe company signed a young basketball player and changed the business of sport for good.

On television, Friday Night Lights, rated 8.0 across five seasons and 76 episodes, is the finest drama ever made about a town and its team; its real subject is a marriage, and the coach and his wife are one of the great couples of the screen. Spinning Out goes behind the scenes of pairs figure skating in ten episodes, and Big Shot sends a hot-tempered college basketball coach to a girls' school, where he learns as much as he teaches.

Double bills

Some titles in the catalogue are best enjoyed side by side, and the pairings make an easy plan for a weekend. The obvious one is Before Sunrise followed by Before Sunset: the same two actors, the same two characters, nine years apart, with the second film answering the question the first leaves open. Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again work the same way, the sequel reaching back to show how the mother's summer began.

Two films tell the life of the same man: Jobs of 2013 and Steve Jobs of 2015. The first is a traditional biography from garage to keynote; the second is built as three backstage conversations before three product launches. Seeing both is a lesson in how differently a life can be told. In music, pair Elvis with A Complete Unknown for two young men who changed popular song a decade apart, or Ray with Selena for two artists who crossed from one audience to all of them.

The period shelf offers its own. Watch the six-part Pride and Prejudice of 1995 and then Lost in Austen, a four-part fantasy in which a modern Londoner steps through a door in her bathroom into the novel and promptly upsets its plot. Follow Jane Eyre with Far from the Madding Crowd for two heroines who insist on running their own lives, or North & South with The Paradise for Victorian England at work, in a cotton mill and in a department store. And the two young doctors, Doogie Howser, M.D. and Doogie Kamealoha, M.D., show how a good idea travels from Los Angeles in 1989 to Hawaii a generation later.

Stories around the table

Food is the quiet star of several films. Julie & Julia cuts between Julia Child learning to cook in post-war Paris and a New York office worker who sets out, decades later, to make every recipe in her book within a year. The Hundred-Foot Journey plants an Indian family restaurant across the road from a celebrated French one, and lets an omelette settle the argument. The Founder tells the less comfortable story of how a milkshake-machine salesman turned a California burger stand into the largest restaurant chain on earth.

Elsewhere the table is where families reveal themselves: the Greek Easter feast, the dinner that goes wrong in The Family Stone, the diner of Gilmore Girls where coffee is poured by the gallon. Sweet Magnolias takes its title from the friends' weekly evening of drinks and conversation. Viewers who like their stories with something on the stove will find a full menu.

The top rated list

Forty titles hold a rating of 7.8 or higher from at least 150 voters, and series occupy most of the top places. The Good Doctor leads at 8.5. Four series follow at 8.3: The Wonder Years, The West Wing, Boy Meets World and When Calls the Heart. Freaks and Geeks, All Creatures Great & Small and Pride and Prejudice stand at 8.2, and North & South, Downton Abbey and Derry Girls at 8.1.

The highest rated films are The Art of Racing in the Rain at 8.1 and, at 8.0, Lion, Flipped and Before Sunrise. A Beautiful Mind, CODA, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Sing Street follow at 7.9, and Before Sunset at 7.8. A rating is an average of many opinions; romantic comedies in particular are marked more severely than they deserve, and plenty of films a little lower down, While You Were Sleeping and Notting Hill among them, are as beloved as anything at the top. The top rated guide has the full list.

Three decades of feeling

The films span thirty-three years. Nine date from the 1990s, the golden age of the romantic comedy, from Father of the Bride in 1991 to Notting Hill and Runaway Bride in 1999. Thirty-two come from the first decade of this century, when the genre was at its most plentiful and a new romance seemed to open every week. Fifty-five, almost half, are from the 2010s, a decade that added true stories and music films in quantity, and sixteen from 2020 onward, many of them made for streaming.

The series reach back further, to the 1960s and to Little House on the Prairie in the 1970s, and forward to shows still being made. Styles have changed. Seasons are shorter now, pictures are sharper, telephones have shrunk and then grown again. The subjects have stayed the same, because they are the permanent ones: how to find the right person, how to be a good parent or a good friend, how to do work that matters. That is why a romance from 1995 can still make a room hold its breath.

Choosing for the evening

The average film on MeloMovie runs for an hour and fifty minutes, and the catalogue suits almost any company. For an evening alone or with a partner, the two Linklater films make a perfect pair, and Past Lives is ideal for a quiet night. For a family, CODA, Lion or The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind will hold three generations. For a group of friends, a musical is the answer, and the room will be singing by the second chorus.

The series are for the long haul. A household might keep one running through the week, an episode after supper, and save a film for Saturday. Gilmore Girls and The Good Doctor will last for months; Pride and Prejudice or North & South can be finished in a weekend. My List holds the plan. Add titles as they catch your eye, and the choice is already made when the evening arrives.

It is worth keeping a box of tissues within reach. These are stories told with feeling, and several of them, the dog who waits, the father who listens, the letter delivered at last, are designed to bring a tear. That is part of the pleasure, and it is what the name of the site promises.

A title page in detail

Take CODA as an example. The poster shows a family of four sitting on the back of a pick-up truck by the harbour. Beside the title are the year 2021, a running time of 112 minutes, the genres Drama, Music and Romance, and a rating of 7.9 on an orange badge. The summary explains that Ruby, the only hearing member of her family, must choose between helping to keep the fishing business afloat and following her talent for singing to a music college. Sian Heder is credited as director; Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur lead the cast, and each name opens that performer's other titles on the site. Choose a country, press the cyan Watch now button, and the services offering the film there are listed with their prices.

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