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The upcoming romance-drama about the Obamas’ first date has found its two leads.
Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter will play the US president and First Lady in Southside With You , about the summer afternoon in 1989 when young associate Barack Obama attempted to woo his future wife, Michelle Robinson.
The couple visit the Art Institute of Chicago, before attending a screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and ending their night with a kiss over some ice-cream. The site of this first smooch is marked with a memorial and they were married three years later.
Richard Tenne will make his directorial debut on the film and has also written the screenplay. Shooting is expected to begin in Chicago this August.
Show all 20 1 /20Best and worst romantic movies Best and worst romantic movies Love it: Romeo and Juliet (1968) Franco Zeffirelli, starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting Zeffirelli brings spectacle and romanticism. His trick was to treat Shakespeare's play as if it was a Hollywood teen love story and to cast two fresh-faced, young leads (Hussey and Whiting, pictured) as the doe-eyed lovers.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: Random Harvest (1942) Mervyn LeRoy, starring Greer Garson, Ronald Colman Post-traumatic stress and romantic obsession collide head on in this wonderfully overcooked Hollywood melodrama. Ronald Colman is the amnesiac English officer, haunted by his memory of the trenches, who somehow contrives to forget that he is madly in love with Greer Garson not once but twice.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) Jacques Demy, starring Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuova This kitsch but delightful romantic musical boasts eye-popping colours and enchanting Michel Legrand music. The storyline is embroiled and dark (this is a small-town tale of misunderstandings and enforced separations) but the film is still full of charm and makes a perfect Valentine's Day confection. The youthful Deneuve has an unworldly beauty.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: Les Amants de Pont Neuf (1991) Leos Carax, starring Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant One of the most expensive French films of its era, this is a big budget epic... about the love affair between two mud-encrusted and homeless but very stylish tramps living on the Paris streets. It's a thoroughly perverse endeavour. Look out for the scene of Juliette Binoche water-skiing down the Seine with fireworks exploding above her.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) Blake Edwards, starring Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard In truth, this isn't a great film. George Peppard (later to star alongside Mr T in The A-Team) is no Cary Grant and the screenplay is bland and evasive by comparison with the Truman Capote novella that inspired it. Nonetheless, the combination of Audrey Hepburn and Henry Mancini's "Moon River" still makes this the perfect Valentine's Day movie.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: Casablanca (1942) Michael Curtiz, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman A usual suspect in any list of Valentine's Day films, Curtiz's romantic drama crackles with wit, style and (in the scenes between Bogart and Bergman, right) plenty of erotic energy. It's a film that can be played again and again, like its famous song As Time Goes By, without ever quite losing its allure.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: An Affair to Remember (1957) Leo McCarey, starring Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr Director Leo McCarey made some of Hollywood's greatest screwball comedies and yet is best remembered for this super-sudsy romantic weepie, adapted from his own earlier film, Love Affair (1939.) Cary Grant is the man about town. Deborah Kerr (pictured with Grant) is the beautiful woman he meets aboard an ocean liner.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: His Girl Friday (1940) Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell It was an inspired decision by Howard Hawks to tweak his remake of The Front Page and to turn the reporter into a woman. Instead of a buddy movie about a hardbitten editor and his star journalist, we get a wonderfully spiky screwball romance in which the dialogue is delivered at a velocity that makes today's romcoms seem horribly tongue-tied.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: L'Atalante (1934) Jean Vigo, starring Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean Dast The brilliant French director brings lyricism, sensuality and intensity to this story about a young married couple on a barge, enduring jealous spats and very tender reconciliations.
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Best and worst romantic movies Love it: A Bout de Souffle (1960) Jean-Luc Godard, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg All you need for a good Valentine's Day movie is a girl, a gun and lots of jump cuts. The gamine-like close-cropped Seberg and the rugged Belmondo make the perfect screen couple in Godard's supremely stylish debut feature.
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: Romeo and Juliet (2013) Carlo Carlei, starring Hailee Steinfeld, Douglas Booth This lifeless reworking of Shakespeare's play lacks any spark. It doesn't even offer the consolation of the original verse (which has been tinkered with by Julian Fellowes to no particular effect).
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: Runaway Bride (1999) Garry Marshall, starring Julia Roberts, Richard Gere Julia Roberts and Richard Gere combined to fine effect in Pretty Woman but their pairing here is far less successful. Roberts plays a woman who has had multiple engagements but can't bring herself to marry. Gere is strangely cast as the New York journalist who reports on her habit of jilting men at the altar.
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: Not Another Happy Ending (2013) John McKay, starring Karen Gillan, Stanley Weber This eccentric and facetious Scottish comedy feels very flat in spite of the charming performance by Gillan as an Annie Hall-like novelist with a bad case of writer's block. (Her creativity only flows when she is miserable.)
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: Sleepless in Seattle (1993) Nora Ephron, starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan Norah Ephron was a tremendously witty and acerbic writer but her features tended to come drenched in schmaltz. Sleepless in Seattle shows off her strengths and is well enough played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Even so, it sinks under its own mawkishness.
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009) Marc Lawrence, starring Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker Excruciating romcom that squanders the considerable comic talents of Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker. They play a New York power couple whose marriage is fraying. After a client is killed, they enter the witness protection programme and head way out west. As Manhattanites, they struggle to adapt to the outdoors life in Wyoming.
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: You've Got Mail (1998) Nora Ephron, starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan A modern-day reworking of the Ernst Lubitsch classic A Shop Around the Corner that simply doesn't deliver. Hanks and Ryan are the email pals who blithely confide in each other without knowing that in "real life" they are sworn enemies. One works for a predatory bookshop chain and the other for a small independent. In today's Amazon age, the film feels very old fashioned indeed.
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: Ghost (1990) Jerry Zucker, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore In hindsight, this hugely popular romantic drama seems ghoulish and very odd. The scene in which Swayze's ghost helps Demi Moore with her pottery is especially creepy.
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Best and worst romantic movies It's over: Love Story (1970) Arthur Hiller, starring Ali MacGraw, Ryan O'Neal Valentine's Day movies should be uplifting. This one, based on the novel by Harvard Latin professor Erich Segal was one of Hollywood's biggest downers of the Seventies, a terminal-illness melodrama with a lachrymose, dirge-like theme song.
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Best and worst romantic movies For the lovelorn: Blue Valentine (2010) Derek Cianfrance, starring Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams An anti-Valentine's film, this is a closely focused, brilliantly acted study of a relationship in good times and bad. It's fascinating as a character study but also ultimately very bleak. Too bleak for Feb 14th...
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Best and worst romantic movies For the lovelorn: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Mike Nichols, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton Mike Nichols' film version of the Edward Albee play about a warring couple (Taylor and Burton, below) in imperious, sacred monster mode) stands as a stark warning for young courting couples about what they.
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Reports have suggested that Southside With You will echo another indie classic, Before Sunrise from Richard Linklater, in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy played strangers who spend the night strolling around Vienna falling in love after meeting on a train.
Sawyers has recently wrapped filming on Snowden and will next be starring in The Autopsy of Jane Doe with Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch.
Sumpter is best known for her role in James Brown biopic Get on Up and has finished work on Ride Along 2 with Olivia Munn.
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