You've Got Mail (PG, 1998)

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is set to open a big-box bookstore on the Upper West Side, a neighborhood that’s fiercely protective of its small shops. (At least it was when the movie was filmed.) Little does he know that the woman he’s been chatting with online, unbeknownst to his frantic, editor girlfriend (Parker Posey), is Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), the proprietor of a small children’s bookstore that will likely be decimated once his mega-store opens its doors. Can love trump commerce?

There’s a reason YOU'VE GOT MAIL has become a romcom classic. It is knit together like a perfectly cabled sweater, with a nary a stitch dropped. The pacing is perfect, the characters likeable, the dialogue breezy. Some observations, including one about the overly complicated choices at chain coffee stores -- Starbucks, specifically -- still hold true. (It was filmed in the 1990s.) The arguments for the ability of small, independent stores to survive against super-stores are hopeful -- but also a sad, really, given how many have foundered in real life.

Nostalgia is one of the charms of You've Got Mail, and the old-fashioned courtship at the heart of it, despite being conducted online, is the most charming of all and references romances-by-letter of times past. Hanks and Ryan have heaps of chemistry, and though the fact that they fall in love given the circumstances seems highly unlikely — the plot’s a little far-fetched, but what romcom doesn’t have an implausible one? — we buy it because, well, why not?