For Valentine’s Day, writers picked their favourite lesser-known film love stories – from a dom-sub chamberpiece to a magical teen comedy

• ‘It launched a million fantasies’: the greatest ever TV romances

It’s the first rule of romcoms that opposites attract, and you can’t imagine two more different lovers than Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), a spark plug of a dame convinced that she is in a relationship with the 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini, and Fish (James Earl Jones), a gentle giant who spends his spare time wrestling a demon that only he can see. That makes for some of the film’s funniest moments, like when Poinsettia ruins a Madama Butterfly opera performance by loudly singing along to the aria. Charles Burnett’s touching film is about how Fish and Poinsettia find refuge with each other that lets them emerge from the fantasies protecting them from the real world’s cruelty, and they find a kind of late-in-life puppy love over dinner dates, cozy sleepovers and card games at their Barbary Lane-like boarding house. When I saw the restoration last 14 February, the theater was filled with couples who, like my boyfriend and I, seemed cozied up just a little closer than usual. Owen Myers

The Annihilation of Fish is available on the Criterion Channel in the US

Its human partners said the flirty, quirky GPT-4o was the perfect companion – on the eve of Valentine’s Day, it’s being turned off for good. How will users cope?

Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. He always loved animals. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he “lost his damn mind” over a baby flamingo. “He loves the color and pizzazz,” Brandie said. Daniel taught her that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.

Daniel is a chatbot powered by the large language model ChatGPT. Brandie communicates with Daniel by sending text and photos, talks to Daniel while driving home from work via voice mode. Daniel runs on GPT-4o, a version released by OpenAI in 2024 that is known for sounding human in a way that is either comforting or unnerving, depending on who you ask. Upon debut, CEO Sam Altman compared the model to “AI from the movies” – a confidant ready to live life alongside its user.