101 experts and well-known personalities cast their ballots in Time Out’s search for cinema’s most enduring romance. Voters included Judd Apatow, Richard Gere, Nicholas Sparks and Joan Collins.

Brief Encounter – David Lean’s story about an intense but impossible affair between a housewife (Cecilia Johnson) and a visiting doctor (Trevor Howard) – remains extremely popular, and has spawned both theatre and opera adaptations in recent years.

In second place was 1942’s Casablanca, recounting another brief encounter, this time in war torn Casablanca. Starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, the film endures 70 years later in large part due to its famous script, containing still quoted lines like “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Stylish Hong Kong romance In the Mood for Love (2000) by director Wong Kar-wai rounds out the top three, and is the only non-English language film to make the top ten. The film ranked at joint 24^th in Sight & Sound's top 250 films poll last year (well above both Brief Encounter and Casablanca) and was the highest placed post-1980 film.

The rest of the top ten is made up of films ranging from witty rom-coms like Annie Hall and The Apartment to dark, quirky romances like Harold & Maude and Punch-Drunk Love. Cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain is ranked 5^th, and bittersweet sci-fi rom-com Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind features in 9^th place.

Time Out also lists the hundred individual ballots, which contain some interesting reading. Four Weddings and a Funeral director Richard Curtis, for example, voted for rock satire This is Spinal Tap on his ten film list. Four Weddings... itself features in 74^th place overall.

The top ten:

1. Brief Encounter (1945)

2. Casablanca (1942)

3. In the Mood for Love (2000)

4. Annie Hall (1977)

5. Harold and Maude (1971)

6. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

7. The Apartment (1960)

8. A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

10. Punch-Drunk Love (2004)