"Actually, really knowing someone doesn't mean anything. People change. A person may like pineapple today and something else tomorrow."

Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. 1994.

Time, expiration, dreams, and rejuvenation are central themes in Chungking Express. Here, the men are trapped in the past; even though one walks a beat and the other jogs obsessively, they're hopeless layabouts. The girls, however, they're the dreamers; one is enterprising, the other always moving, dancing, looking up. In these sad, funny pairings, Wong suggests it takes at least two people to save just one. This hope, this optimism -- so buoyant here, unlike his other work -- is just one of the reasons he really does live up to the title "most romantic filmmaker in the world." I forget who called him that. Doesn't matter. Good pick for Valentine's Day.

"Well, well, well! Mr. Blind Man, you're positively an incredible human being. You're a walking advertisement for hiring the handicapped!"

Written by Charles Robert Carner. Directed by Phillip Noyce. 1989.

How about this: in the movie's opening scenes, while walking along a Miami roadside, our blind hero encounters an alligator. He taps it with his cane. It growls. "Nice doggy," our hero says and steps lightly over it and continues on his way. The eighties: what a strange and nimble time for the action genre. Rutger Hauer plays his blind swordsman (blinded in Vietnam and taught to "see" again by an entire village) to the hilt. He knows when to dodder and when to slash, and he earns every laugh he gets. Randall "Tex" Cobb and Noble Willingham are hambone-fisted villains, appropriately as flat as Hauer's blade. The screenwriters aren't apologetic for making their bad guys cartoons, nor for letting the kid be a brat, and while it's all very sentimental and goofy in the end, well, it's also pretty darn funny.