Girls Like Girls Captures the Thrill of Falling in Love—Plus Four More Powerful Romances

In Hayley Kiyoko's Girls Like Girls, Coley (Maya da Costa) has just moved to a small town in Oregon after her mother’s death when she meets Sonya (Myra Molloy), a charismatic girl at the center of the town’s social circle. Glances turn to flirtations which turn into a feeling of real love. For Kiyoko, the film’s story has had many incarnations from hit song, video, novel, and now film. “Every single person has experienced having a crush on somebody, not knowing where they’re at, whether that person likes them back,” Kiyoko says in the production notes. “No matter your sexuality, everyone has that in common. That’s why Girls Like Girls reflects such a universal experience.”

With Girls Like Girls coming to theaters, we are showcasing four classic tales of first love, each capturing the ineffable emotion of experiencing romance for the first time.

Get tickets for Girls Like Girls, now playing in theaters!

Pariah

In Dee Rees’ Pariah, Alike (Adepero Oduye), a Black teen living in Brooklyn, is trying to understand her place in the world. In addition to writing poetry, navigating the LGBTQ+ community, and getting distance from her parents’ strict morality, she falls in love for the first time. “It was sorting through all that and understanding first love,” Rees told IndieWire, that Alike begins to understand her own destiny and identity. Indeed, the experience inspires her work as a poet. Like Alike’s art, the film expresses “a universal sensitivity that relates the pangs of first love, the desirous ache of adolescent sexuality and the excitement of not just discovering yourself but finding those kindred spirits with whom you can share your life,” writes The Playlist.

Watch Pariah on Apple TV or Amazon.

Of an Age

Set in Melbourne during the summer of 1999, Goran Stoleski’s Of an Age “explores the enduring nature of first love,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. When 17-year-old Kol (Elias Anton) meets Adam (Thom Green), the older brother of his ballroom dance partner, his life skips a beat. The two men have only a day together—chasing down Adam’s sister, talking about their lives, and remembering the books they’ve loved—since Adam is slated to leave the country the next day. But in those 24 hours, Kol experiences feelings that will linger long into the future. Stoleski told RogerEbert.com, the film emerged from “this very vivid flashback of what it felt like on the inside to be that age in that time and place, and what it felt like for me and what I felt love was.” The brief romance, writes Flicks, “is a timeless capsule of love at its most unguarded.”

Watch Of an Age on Apple TV or Amazon.

Kajillionaire

A confidence caper, a comedy of manners, and a coming-of-age tale, Miranda July’s innovative Kajillionaire is also a story of first love. When perhaps the worst con artists in Los Angeles, the Dyne family—Robert (Richard Jenkins), Theresa (Debra Winger), and their daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood)—meet Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), they hope to add a new member to their criminal gang. Old Dolio, however, has met the woman who will change her life. Autostraddle writes, “Old Dolio has the desire to love and be loved, she just hasn’t seen an avenue to wholeness that involves selflessness on the part of others, not herself.” With Melanie, she finds real love for the first time.

Watch Kajillionaire on Apple TV or Amazon.

Moonrise Kingdom

In Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson tells a story of first love that captures in his unique cinematic style the dizzying, unfathomable, and unforgettable feelings of first love. After meeting on New Penzance Island in 1964, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) pen passionate letters, promising each other a secret rendezvous. While the film is not autobiographical, Anderson explains in Vanity Fair, “The movie is kind of like a fantasy that I think I would have had at that age.” Even after the adults (played by a cast including Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton) pull the young couple out of their fantasy love and back into the real world, the feeling of first love lingers. Rolling Stone writes, “By evoking the joys and terrors of childhood, it reminds us how to be alive.”

Watch Moonrise Kingdom now on iTunes or Amazon.