(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Most people think so. 84% of audiences gave it a thumbs up, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 80%.

Tom, greeting-card writer and hopeless romantic, is caught completely off-guard when his girlfriend, Summer, suddenly dumps him. He reflects on their 500 days together to try to figure out where their love affair went sour, and in doing so, Tom rediscovers his true passions in life. Wikipedia ↗

(500) Days of Summer is a 2009 American romantic comedy-drama directed by Marc Webb. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Tom Hansen, a greeting card writer and hopeless romantic who falls head over heels for Summer Finn, played by Zooey Deschanel, a free-spirited new coworker who doesn't believe in love or commitment. The film's structure is deliberately nonlinear, jumping between different days of Tom and Summer's 500-day relationship, juxtaposing moments of ecstatic romance against the painful reality of their incompatibility.

The opening narrator explicitly warns the audience that this is not a love story, and the film systematically deconstructs the romantic comedy genre's conventions while exploring the difference between loving someone and being in love with the idea of someone. Marc Webb's inventive visual approach included a split-screen "Expectations vs. Reality" sequence depicting Tom's hopes for an evening versus what actually happens, a spontaneous musical number set to Hall & Oates' "You Make My Dreams," and deliberate visual references to classic films that Tom's romanticized worldview filters his experience through.

Zooey Deschanel's Summer was carefully written as neither villain nor prize — the film acknowledges that she was honest about her feelings from the start and that Tom's suffering was largely self-inflicted by his refusal to accept her at her word. The film earned $60 million worldwide on a $7.5 million budget and became a generational touchstone for millennial audiences navigating the disconnect between romantic idealism and modern dating reality.