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The counterintuitive romance is one in which two people who truly shouldn’t fall in love do, often under extraordinary and unromantic circumstances. Most often, these relationships run slim odds of ending with wedding bells. Too young, too old, too uninterested in social acceptance, the protagonists of these love stories breathe the same thin air as anti-heroes and outsiders; they are, in short, unidealized and identifiably human.

With Martin Luther King’s birthday past us, and Black History month coming up, the time is right to celebrate those invaluable films that shed light on the black community’s long struggle for equal rights in this country.

Love it or hate it: our system of justice is a large part of what keeps anarchy at bay — and us safe. Deny that if you will. Still, there’s plenty to question and complain about. Like so many of our institutions, sometimes it works, too often it doesn’t. But no one yet has found a better model.

There’s a reason why great lines from movies become part of the culture: they express feelings with a concision and accuracy that rarely, if ever, happens in real life. And nowhere is such eloquence more valuable than in affairs of the heart. Movies say what we would like to say, and in romantic movies they say what we would most love to have said to us.

Technology aside, timeless films remind us that that the pressures and vicissitudes of the workplace and the vagaries of office politics have been around pretty much forever (unlike the cell phone).

Why not go outdoors for a run, you ask? Because I find that by working out on that machine in front of a great action movie, I feel the exertion less and time seems to go by quicker. It all has to do with adrenaline, I'm told.

The movies can take you places you’ve never been before, but they also take you places you will never go — and we’re not just talking about outer space here. Rather, these are points on the map of the real world that are inaccessible by all but the most hardy man and/or beast.

Ah, that eternal question: which is better, the book or the movie? Though such comparisons are natural, even inevitable, they’re also kind of pointless, since the conventions of each medium differ so markedly. Books explore the dense inner lives of characters in a way movies can’t, while films use sight, sound and motion to create an immediacy books can’t.

I’ll never forget the segment on “60 Minutes” a couple of years ago, when Morley Safer interviewed our most famous living historian, David McCullough.