OFilmyHub

How OFilmyHub looks

OFilmyHub has been given a calm, bookish look of its own, since the site it is named after left behind too little to copy. The page is the colour of cream paper. Across the top runs a navy bar with the OFilmyHub name, its first letter set in a ring, a row of menu links, Home, Movies, Period, Young Love, Collections, A-Z and My List, and a rounded search box with a dark red button.

The title of the site is set in a classic serif face, with a row of rounded chips beneath it, one for each mood: Costume and period, From the bookshelf, True stories, Fate and fantasy, Young love, Music and dance, Second chances and Far away. Then comes a list headed Most loved, laid out in two columns of wide white tiles. Each tile has a small poster at the left and, at the right, the title in serif type, the year, the running time, the rating and two lines of the story, so that a film can be judged at a glance. A grid of posters headed Best rated follows, then a second list of New arrivals, and three lists of categories, decades and help pages.

The colours are cream, white, navy and a dark red for links and buttons. Headings are set in Playfair Display and text in Source Sans. On a telephone the menu folds behind a button with three lines and the tiles stand in a single column.

Costume and period

The largest group of films on OFilmyHub is set in the past. The Costume and period category holds 66 films, and the Costume and period help page suggests where to begin.

Three films by the producer Ismail Merchant, the director James Ivory and the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala set the standard. A Room with a View, from 1986, from the novel by E. M. Forster, begins in Florence, where Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman travelling with a nervous chaperone, is kissed in a field of barley by a young man of whom her family would disapprove, and returns home to Surrey engaged to somebody else. Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith and Daniel Day-Lewis lead the cast, and the film is light, sunlit and very funny. Howards End, from 1992, also from Forster, sets two clever sisters against a family of businessmen in the England of 1910, with a country house as the prize; Emma Thompson won the Academy Award for best actress.

The Remains of the Day, from 1993, from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, is the finest of the three. Stevens, the butler of a great house in the 1930s, has given his whole life to the ideal of perfect service, so completely that he fails to see either the errors of his employer or the feelings of the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who waits for a word he is unable to say. Twenty years later he drives across England to visit her. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are both extraordinary, and the scene in which she tries to see what book he is reading is among the most quietly moving in the cinema.

Royal lives supply another group. The Young Victoria, from 2009, written by Julian Fellowes, shows the eighteen-year-old queen, played by Emily Blunt, learning to rule and falling in love with her cousin Albert, in a marriage that began as an arrangement between families. Elizabeth: The Golden Age, from 2007, has Cate Blanchett as the first Elizabeth in the years of the Spanish Armada. Anna and the King, from 1999, with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat, tells the story of the English governess at the court of Siam in the 1860s. Diana and My Week with Marilyn, in which a young assistant on a film set spends a few days looking after the most famous woman in the world, are portraits from the last century, and the two films that continue the television saga of an English country house, Downton Abbey: A New Era and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, close the family's story in the 1920s and 1930s.

America has its own costume dramas. The Age of Innocence, from 1993, directed by Martin Scorsese from the novel by Edith Wharton, is set in the wealthy New York of the 1870s, where a young lawyer engaged to a suitable girl falls in love with her cousin, a countess who has left her husband, and the whole of society closes ranks, politely, to keep them apart. Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder play the three. Far and Away, from 1992, follows an Irish tenant farmer and his landlord's daughter, played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, to the Oklahoma land race of 1893. The New World, Cinderella Man, with Russell Crowe as a boxer of the Depression and Renee Zellweger as the wife who waits at home, The Majestic, Water for Elephants, set in a travelling circus in 1931, and The Legend of Bagger Vance belong to the same shelf.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, from 2003, imagines the story behind a famous painting: Griet, a maid in the household of the painter Vermeer in Delft in 1665, who has an eye for colour and becomes, in secret, his assistant and his model. Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth play the pair, and every frame is lit like one of his pictures. The Painted Veil, Tristan & Isolde, First Knight, Pompeii, The Promise, Ophelia, which retells a famous tragedy from the point of view of its heroine, and Cyrano, from 2021, a musical version of the play about the soldier-poet who writes love letters for another man, complete the group.

From the bookshelf

More than a third of these films began as novels, and the From the bookshelf category holds 55 of them. The From the bookshelf help page sorts them into classics and modern novels, and the Austen and the Brontes help page follows three great names.

Jane Austen is represented by Mansfield Park, from 1999, and Northanger Abbey, from 2007, with Felicity Jones as a girl who has read too many thrilling novels, and by Becoming Jane, which imagines the young author's own romance with an Irish law student. Charlotte Bronte's great novel appears twice: Jane Eyre, from 2011, with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, tells the story of the governess and her employer in a wind-swept, candlelit style, and Jane Eyre, from 1996, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, is the more traditional version. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, from 1992, with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Wuthering Heights, from 2011, do the same for the moors.

Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, from 2015, follows Bathsheba Everdene, who inherits a farm and is courted by a shepherd, a landowner and a sergeant, with Carey Mulligan in the part. Charles Dickens is here in Great Expectations, Thackeray in Vanity Fair, directed by Mira Nair with Reese Witherspoon as the irrepressible Becky Sharp, Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady, and Daphne du Maurier in My Cousin Rachel. Shakespeare's lovers appear in two versions: Romeo + Juliet, from 1996, directed by Baz Luhrmann, keeps the verse and moves the feud to a modern city of fast cars and neon, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, and Romeo & Juliet, from 2013, returns to Verona.

Modern novels supply the popular successes. One Day, from 2011, visits two friends, Emma and Dexter, on the same date, the fifteenth of July, every year for twenty years. The Time Traveler's Wife is about a librarian who slips through time against his will and the woman who has known him since she was six. P.S. I Love You, The Light Between Oceans, about a lighthouse keeper and his wife on a remote Australian island, All the Pretty Horses, The Horse Whisperer and 84 Charing Cross Road, from 1987, the true and delightful story of a twenty-year correspondence between a New York writer and a London bookseller who are kept apart by an ocean, come from the same shelf.

One novelist has a help page to himself. Nicholas Sparks sets his stories on the coast of North Carolina and has given the cinema seven of the films here, listed on the Nicholas Sparks help page. Message in a Bottle, from 1999, begins when a journalist finds a love letter washed up on a beach and goes looking for the widower who wrote it. A Walk to Remember, from 2002, is the best loved: Landon, a careless, popular schoolboy, is made to take part in the school play and falls in love with Jamie, the minister's quiet daughter, who has a list of things she hopes to do and a reason for hurrying. Mandy Moore and Shane West play them. Nights in Rodanthe, The Lucky One, The Best of Me, The Longest Ride and The Choice followed.

Fate and fantasy

Some love stories bend the rules of the world. The Fate and fantasy category holds 25 of them, and the Fate and fantasy help page arranges them.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from 2008, directed by David Fincher, is the most popular film in this catalogue. Benjamin is born in New Orleans in 1918 with the body of a very old man and grows younger every year. As a wrinkled child in a home for the elderly he meets Daisy, a girl of six; their lives run in opposite directions, and for a few years in the middle they are the same age. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play them across eight decades, and the film, which won three Academy Awards, is a long, gentle meditation on time.

The Lake House, from 2006, reunites Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. A doctor leaving a glass house on a lake puts a note for the next tenant in the letter box; the reply comes from an architect who is living there two years earlier. They write to each other through the box, fall in love, and try to arrange a meeting across the gap. The Age of Adaline, from 2015, is about a woman, played by Blake Lively, who stopped ageing at twenty-nine in the 1930s and has moved from city to city ever since. Forever Young, If Only, In Your Eyes, about two strangers who can see through each other's eyes, The In Between, Winter's Tale and Upside Down, set on twin planets with opposite gravity, play with similar ideas.

Visitors from elsewhere appear in several films. In City of Angels, from 1998, an angel who watches over Los Angeles, played by Nicolas Cage, falls in love with a heart surgeon, played by Meg Ryan, and must decide whether to give up eternity to be with her. In Meet Joe Black, from the same year, Death takes the form of a young man, played by Brad Pitt, to learn about life from a wealthy publisher, played by Anthony Hopkins, and is distracted by the publisher's daughter. Always, from 1989, directed by Steven Spielberg, is about a pilot who returns as a guiding spirit. What Dreams May Come, with Robin Williams, is a journey through an afterlife painted like a canvas, The Fountain tells one love story in three ages, and Phenomenon, Charlie St. Cloud, Beautiful Creatures, Fallen, Ondine, The Space Between Us, Equals and Little Fish range from fairy tale to science fiction.

Young love

The Young love category holds 66 films, and the Young love help page picks from it. Pretty in Pink, from 1986, written by John Hughes, is the classic: Andie, a girl from the poor side of town who makes her own clothes, is asked to the school dance by a rich boy, to the dismay of her devoted friend Duckie. Molly Ringwald plays her. The Man in the Moon, from 1991, was the first film of Reese Witherspoon, at fourteen, as a girl on a Louisiana farm in the 1950s who falls for the boy next door.

Recent films for younger viewers often have a shadow over them, handled gently. In Midnight Sun, from 2018, a girl who must avoid daylight meets, at a railway station at night, the boy she has watched from her window for years. Now Is Good, Keith, Restless, All My Life, 2 Hearts and Words on Bathroom Walls, about a talented young cook who is learning to live with an illness of the mind, are in the same vein. Lighter are The Art of Getting By, Crazy/Beautiful, Blue Crush, about a surfer in Hawaii, SPF-18, Raise Your Voice, Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between, Turtles All the Way Down and The Map That Leads to You, from 2025, which follows a young traveller across Europe.

Like Crazy, from 2011, is about an English student and an American who fall in love at college in Los Angeles and are separated by a visa; much of it was improvised, and it feels unusually true. Love at First Sight, from 2023, takes place on a single flight from New York to London and the day that follows, and Finding You, Love and Honor and The Romantics are about students and recent graduates.

True stories

The True stories category holds 18 films about real couples, and the True stories help page lists them.

The Theory of Everything, from 2014, is the story of the physicist Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane, from their meeting as students at Cambridge in 1963, through the diagnosis that gave him two years to live, to the decades of work, children and fame that followed. Eddie Redmayne won the Academy Award for best actor, and Felicity Jones is his equal as the woman who refused to accept the doctors' verdict. The same two actors appear in The Aeronauts, from 2019, as a scientist and a balloon pilot who rise higher than anyone before them in 1862.

Shadowlands, from 1993, directed by Richard Attenborough, is about the writer C. S. Lewis, a bachelor don at Oxford who had arranged his life to avoid strong feeling, and Joy Gresham, the outspoken American poet who disturbed it. Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger play them. Bright Star, from 2009, directed by Jane Campion, tells the love story of the poet John Keats and his neighbour Fanny Brawne, through three years and with the poems themselves. Maudie, from 2016, stars Sally Hawkins as a painter from Nova Scotia, small, arthritic and irrepressibly cheerful, who goes to keep house for a gruff fish seller, played by Ethan Hawke, and covers his tiny house with flowers and birds.

Out of Africa, from 1985, which won seven Academy Awards including best picture, is drawn from the memoirs of the Danish writer Karen Blixen. She arrives in Kenya in 1913 to run a coffee farm, in a marriage of convenience to a baron, and finds the love of her life in an English hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, who will share her house and her stories while guarding his freedom. Meryl Streep and Robert Redford play them, and the flight over the Rift Valley in a small yellow biplane, to the music of John Barry, is one of the great sequences of the 1980s. Julie & Julia, Radioactive, about Marie and Pierre Curie, Breathe, Mary Shelley, Rebel in the Rye, Death Defying Acts and Song Sung Blue, from 2025, about a married couple who perform the songs of a famous singer, are also taken from life.

Music and dance

The Music and dance category holds 40 films, and the Music and dance help page divides them. Dance films follow a pattern as fixed as a waltz: two people from different worlds, a competition, a first rehearsal that goes badly. Step Up 3D, StreetDance 3D and StreetDance 2 set street dancers against ballet and Latin dancers. High Strung, from 2016, pairs a classical dancer with a violinist who plays in the underground, and High Strung Free Dance followed. Dance with Me, from 1998, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, set in Cuba in 1958, Honey 3: Dare to Dance and Kiss and Cry, about a figure skater, are in the same family.

Across the Universe, from 2007, directed by Julie Taymor, tells a love story of the 1960s entirely through the songs of the Beatles, with characters called Jude, Lucy and Prudence. In the Heights, from 2021, from the stage musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, is set over three hot days in a neighbourhood of upper Manhattan. Beyond the Lights, Country Strong, and Raise Your Voice are stories of gifted young performers, and Mona Lisa Smile, though about a teacher of art, has the same spirit of young people finding their own voices.

Second chances

The Second chances category holds 27 films about love after loss or late in life, and the Second chances help page arranges them.

P.S. I Love You, from 2007, begins after the death of a young husband, who has arranged for a series of letters to reach his widow through the following year, each with a task to help her begin again. Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler play the couple. Love Happens, Bounce, Moonlight Mile, Collateral Beauty and The Secret: Dare to Dream treat the same subject, and Regarding Henry, from 1991, is about a hard, successful lawyer, played by Harrison Ford, who loses his memory and has to learn again how to be a husband and father, and does it better the second time.

Love in later life is treated with respect. Last Chance Harvey, from 2008, has Dustin Hoffman as a tired American who has come to London for his daughter's wedding and Emma Thompson as the airport employee he meets in a bar; they spend a day walking along the Thames. Away from Her, from 2007, the first film directed by Sarah Polley, is about a husband whose wife of forty-four years, played by Julie Christie, is losing her memory. The Vow, Remember Sunday, At First Sight and Adam, about a gentle young man with a form of autism and his new neighbour, find their second chances in other ways.

Far away

A love story gains a great deal from a landscape, and the Far away category holds 20 films set a long way from home. The Far away help page maps them.

Out of Africa is the grandest. The Painted Veil, from 2006, from the novel by Somerset Maugham, takes an unhappy English couple, a serious young doctor and his restless wife, played by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, to a remote Chinese town during an outbreak of cholera in the 1920s, where they come to know each other for the first time. Australia, from 2008, directed by Baz Luhrmann, sends an English aristocrat, played by Nicole Kidman, to drive two thousand head of cattle across the northern outback with a rough stockman played by Hugh Jackman. A Walk in the Clouds, from 1995, is set among the vineyards of California just after the Second World War, and Medicine Man, with Sean Connery, in the rainforest of the Amazon.

The open country of the American West is the setting of The Horse Whisperer, from 1998, directed by and starring Robert Redford, in which a New York editor drives her injured daughter and the girl's horse to Montana in search of a man with a gift for healing both; of All the Pretty Horses; and of The Longest Ride, which sets a modern romance between an art student and a rodeo rider beside the long marriage of an old man, told in letters. The sea carries The Light Between Oceans, Message in a Bottle and Ondine, an Irish story of a fisherman who pulls a woman from the water in his net, and Ireland also appears in The Secret Scripture and Finding You.

Quiet films worth finding

Some of the best films in the catalogue are the least known. Lars and the Real Girl, from 2007, is about a painfully shy young man in a small northern town, played by Ryan Gosling, who introduces his family to a companion who is, as everyone can see, a doll; the town, led by its doctor and its churchgoers, decides to treat her as he does, and the kindness of the whole community slowly brings him back to the world. It is far gentler than its premise suggests. Blue Jay, from 2016, shot in black and white with two actors, follows two former sweethearts who meet by chance in a supermarket in their home town and spend an evening remembering.

Summerland, from 2020, set on the coast of Kent during the Second World War, is about a solitary writer who is made to take in a boy evacuated from London. Trouble with the Curve gives Clint Eastwood the part of an elderly baseball scout whose daughter, played by Amy Adams, joins him on what may be his last trip. Sweet November, Autumn in New York, Up Close & Personal, with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer as a television journalist and his pupil, For Love of the Game, Lucky You, Waiting for Forever, In My Dreams, A Wish for Christmas, Mrs. Winterbourne and The American President, from 1995, written by Aaron Sorkin, in which a widowed president, played by Michael Douglas, asks a lobbyist to dinner and discovers that even he must send his own flowers, are further pleasures.

Actors to follow

The Actors to follow help page suggests paths through the catalogue by performer. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, together in Howards End and The Remains of the Day, are the finest pairing here, and each appears elsewhere: he in Shadowlands, Meet Joe Black and 84 Charing Cross Road, she in Last Chance Harvey. Robert Redford links Out of Africa, The Horse Whisperer, Up Close & Personal and, as director only, The Legend of Bagger Vance.

Felicity Jones has four films, from Northanger Abbey and Like Crazy to The Theory of Everything and The Aeronauts. Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield play another devoted couple in the true story Breathe. Rachel McAdams leads The Time Traveler's Wife and The Vow; Reese Witherspoon appears at fourteen in The Man in the Moon and later in Vanity Fair and Water for Elephants; Keanu Reeves in A Walk in the Clouds, Sweet November and The Lake House; and Nicole Kidman in Far and Away, The Portrait of a Lady and Australia. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Julie Christie, Kate Hudson, Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron and Mia Wasikowska all lead films here.

Directors matter too. James Ivory made three of the essential films. Baz Luhrmann made Romeo + Juliet and Australia. Jane Campion made The Portrait of a Lady and Bright Star. Richard Attenborough made Shadowlands, Sydney Pollack Out of Africa, Martin Scorsese The Age of Innocence, Mira Nair Vanity Fair, Lasse Hallstrom The Map That Leads to You and Nora Ephron Julie & Julia, in which a young New Yorker cooks her way through the famous book of a great American cook, played by Meryl Streep, whose own late-blooming marriage is the happiest in the catalogue.

Decade by decade

Four categories arrange the catalogue by date, and the Decade by decade help page describes them. The Before 2000 category holds 35 films: Out of Africa, A Room with a View, Pretty in Pink, Always, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, Shadowlands, The Age of Innocence, Romeo + Juliet, City of Angels, Meet Joe Black and Message in a Bottle. It was the age of the literary adaptation, with long running times and large orchestras.

The The 2000s category holds 43: A Walk to Remember, Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Lake House, The Painted Veil, P.S. I Love You, Lars and the Real Girl, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Young Victoria and Bright Star. The The 2010s category is the largest, with 60: One Day, Jane Eyre, The Vow, The Theory of Everything, The Age of Adaline, Far from the Madding Crowd, Maudie, The Light Between Oceans and Midnight Sun.

The The 2020s category holds 19, among them Summerland, Radioactive, In the Heights, Cyrano, Love at First Sight, Song Sung Blue, The Map That Leads to You and Reminders of Him, from 2026. The Best rated category gathers the 39 films rated 7.2 or more out of ten by viewers around the world; the Most loved list on the home page, ordered by the number of votes, is a second guide.

Finding a film

There are several ways to find a film on OFilmyHub, and the Finding titles help page describes each one. The search box in the navy bar accepts a title and shows matching films as you type. The mood chips under the title open the categories, the A to Z page lists all 157 films in alphabetical order, and the Movies page lists them by popularity.

A few titles need care. Two films are called Jane Eyre and two are called Wuthering Heights, and the year on each tile tells them apart; the two versions of the Verona story are spelt differently, Romeo + Juliet for 1996 and Romeo & Juliet for 2013. Titles that begin with a number, 2 Hearts and 84 Charing Cross Road, are filed before the letter A. Punctuation is ignored by the search, and one distinctive word, Adaline, Maudie or Rodanthe, is usually enough.

What a title page shows

The page for a film sets out the essentials in a fixed order. At the top stand the poster, the title, the year, the running time and the average rating from viewers worldwide. The story comes next, followed by the genres, the director and the principal cast, and then a row of films that share a category with this one. The Watch now button brings up the official services that offer the film in your country.

Romantic dramas are easy to find on official services. The large streaming services carry many of them, the studios' own services hold their libraries, and almost every title can be rented or bought for a small sum from the digital shops. Many are offered with Hindi and other soundtracks or subtitles, chosen in the player. What a subscription includes changes from month to month, so the list on each title page is the place to look.

The Add to My List button on a title page puts a film on your own list. The list is kept in the browser on your device, requires neither registration nor a password, and opens from the My List link at the end of the navy bar. The My List help page explains how to remove a film and how to move the list to another device.

A first week

Here are seven evenings for a viewer new to the catalogue. On the first, watch Out of Africa. On the second, A Room with a View, for sunshine. On the third, The Lake House. On the fourth, The Theory of Everything. On the fifth, A Walk to Remember, with the teenagers. On the sixth, The Remains of the Day, and on the seventh, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is long enough to fill a Sunday afternoon.

A second week might hold Jane Eyre, Shadowlands, One Day, Maudie, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Last Chance Harvey and Lars and the Real Girl. For an evening of music, choose Across the Universe or In the Heights; for a wet afternoon with a pot of tea, 84 Charing Cross Road or Northanger Abbey; and for a long winter night, the two films of the house at Downton.

A note for readers. Half the pleasure of the films in this catalogue lies in the books behind them, and a household that enjoys Far from the Madding Crowd or The Age of Innocence on screen has a ready-made reading list. The films are faithful enough to send a viewer to the novel and different enough to make the novel a fresh experience, and several of them, the two Bronte adaptations of 2011 in particular, repay a second viewing once the book has been read.

The shapes a love story takes

It helps to know the handful of shapes that these stories follow, since they tell a viewer what kind of evening to expect. The first is the obstacle story, in which two people are plainly right for each other and something stands in the way: class in A Room with a View and Pretty in Pink, family in the two Verona films, duty in The Remains of the Day, an ocean in Like Crazy. The pleasure lies in watching the obstacle tested.

The second is the story of a marriage, which begins where the first kind ends. The Theory of Everything, Shadowlands, Maudie, The Painted Veil and Away from Her are about what two people become over years, and they are often the most rewarding films for older viewers. The third is the story of memory, told by someone looking back: the old woman reading a diary in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the letters of The Longest Ride, the returning traveller of Out of Africa. These films are gentle in pace and rich in feeling.

The fourth is the story of healing, in which love arrives to someone who has stopped expecting it: the widow of P.S. I Love You, the lawyer of Regarding Henry, the shy brother of Lars and the Real Girl, the tired father of Last Chance Harvey. And the fifth is the fable, where the rules of time or nature are altered so that a truth about love can be seen more clearly; The Lake House, The Age of Adaline, City of Angels and Meet Joe Black are fables, and they should be watched in that spirit, as modern fairy tales.

The music of the films

A romantic drama leans on its score more than any other kind of film, and several of the best-known pieces of film music of the past forty years were written for titles in this catalogue. John Barry's theme for Out of Africa, broad and slow as the plain it accompanies, won an Academy Award and is played in concert halls. Richard Robbins wrote the restrained, glinting scores of the three Ivory films. Rachel Portman, the first woman to win the award for a film score, wrote the music of several English adaptations of the 1990s, and Dario Marianelli, Alexandre Desplat and Johann Johannsson, whose music for The Theory of Everything won a Golden Globe, carried the tradition on.

Songs matter as much in the modern films. A Walk to Remember gave its leading actress a hit record, City of Angels produced two songs that were played for a decade, and Romeo + Juliet was sold to a generation by its soundtrack as much as by its stars. Across the Universe and In the Heights are built entirely of songs, and in the dance films the choice of music is half the story. Many of these soundtracks are available on the music services, and a film that has been enjoyed can be kept in the house a little longer that way.

The places on screen

The landscapes of these films are real, and several can be visited. The barley field and the hillside villas of A Room with a View are above Florence. The great houses of the English adaptations are open to the public for much of the year: the house that stands in for Howards End is in Oxfordshire, the hall used in The Remains of the Day is in Gloucestershire, and the castle of the Downton films, in Hampshire, receives visitors every summer. The moors of the Bronte films are in Yorkshire, where the parsonage in which the sisters wrote is now a museum.

Further off, the farmhouse of Karen Blixen outside Nairobi is preserved as it was, with the hills she wrote about on the horizon. The beach towns of the Carolina romances, Wilmington, Southport and the Outer Banks, have made a small industry of showing visitors where the films were shot, and the glass house of The Lake House was built for the film on a lake near Chicago. Viewers who like to travel will find that a romantic drama makes an agreeable guidebook.

Watching in company

These films are at their best when shared. A costume drama suits an afternoon with grandparents, who will often know the book; a fable such as The Age of Adaline suits an evening for two; and the school romances are a safe choice for a group of teenagers, with the advantage that most were made from novels they may then be persuaded to read. For a mixed household, the true stories are the surest ground, since everyone can argue afterwards about what really happened.

It is worth choosing by length as well as by subject. The older adaptations run well over two hours and reward a quiet, uninterrupted evening; many of the recent films, especially those made for the streaming services, are done in ninety minutes. The running time is shown on every tile and every title page, so an evening can be planned to the minute.

What the ratings mean

Every film on OFilmyHub was rated PG-13, PG or G by the American ratings board. G means suitable for all ages, PG suggests that parents may wish to watch with younger children, and PG-13 advises that some material may be unsuitable for those under thirteen, which in a romantic drama usually means a kiss, a sad turn in the story or a serious subject such as illness. Films with the stricter R rating were left out, and so were PG-13 films centred on betrayal. The gentlest titles include Northanger Abbey, The Young Victoria, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Aeronauts, Raise Your Voice, A Wish for Christmas and the two Downton Abbey films.

How the catalogue is kept

OFilmyHub adds a film only after someone has considered it. The certificate is checked first, then the story and the guidance written for parents are read, and titles that would embarrass a family room are passed over. The summaries are short and plain, the years and running times are confirmed in the public film databases, and the posters are the official ones. The tiles, the chips and the counts on the home page are rebuilt at each refresh of the catalogue.

OFilmyHub is a guide. It carries neither films nor download files; the Watch now button opens an official, licensed service, so the people who made the film are paid when you watch.

Questions and answers

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