An Affair to Remember (1957)

Only a person intent on being fed fairy tales would interpret the ending of McCarey’s film as purely glorious or decisively final. Instead, it’s a bittersweet moment: Two people who changed cataclysmically while together, then painfully while apart, are finally reacquainted and given a rare second chance at a relationship. Terry starts the film as a vibrant girl with a potentially disastrous future, yet she ends it bedridden and profoundly happy. McCarey’s brilliance, and his films’ indelible effect, stem from his recognition that true love is a cousin of wisdom. It’s not a peak that you reach; it’s a series of experiences that help make you a better person.

— John Lingan (Slant Magazine)

McCarey is frequently compared to Japanese master Yasujirô Ozu, and indeed, An Affair to Remember looks back at Love Affair the way Ozu’s Floating Weeds looks back at A Story of Floating Weeds: as a story that once moved the director, retold in changed times as an act of defiantly anachronistic humanism.

— Fernandi F. Froce (Slant Magazine)