The late night movie is one of late summer’s greatest pleasures. Not too long ago, I spent a sticky summer evening in the Prince Charles Cinema, a former blue movie theatre specialising in repertory cinema (aka old films) and smack bang in the middle of London’s Chinatown. I watched Modern Romance, a film about a couple who break up and make up in a toxic, seemingly never-ending loop. You might’ve seen its curly-haired writer, director and star Albert Brooks in Broadcast News (your mum’s favourite late ‘80s romcom, and mine too), but you’ve almost certainly never seen this film – after all, it was never released on DVD here in the UK.Made in 1981, it derives a big chunk of its comedy from its main character’s compulsive drunk dialling habit – but swap the landline for an iPhone and you’ll see that not much has changed over the last 25 years. However, the most modern thing about Modern Romance isn’t the way it prefigures boozy bad decisions, but its cynical ending. Although (spoiler!) the last scene sees the film’s central couple get engaged, an epilogue that plays over the top of the seemingly-happy ending tells us that they will eventually divorce.As I waited for the night bus home after my screening, I couldn’t help but wonder… does it matter if a romantic comedy couple end up together? Wracking my brains for examples of romcoms in which the couples broke up, I tried to come up with a list.There’s Annie Hall, of course, and Broadcast News too, although people don’t like to think of these films as romcoms. My Best Friend’s Wedding counts. Indie anomalies like 500 Days of Summer, Celeste and Jesse Forever, the TV shows New Girl and Master of None, and the new Bridget Jones film in which her Darcy is dead . This depressed me.A quick Google of modern romcoms will throw up lists and features (nearly all of them written by men) about tolerable exceptions to the sea of supposed shit since the genre’s golden age of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Recently, the romcom has lurched into the friend zone, with buddy comedies like Bridesmaids and the Magic Mike franchise suggesting that the greatest love affairs are platonic – and that in modern life, romance figures as a subplot. Even films that stick more closely to the classic formula, like Appropriate Behaviour or Obvious Child seem to settle for relaxed definitions of ‘relationships’. That’s not to mention the Judd Apatow school of bromantic comedies – male-centric stories that skew more com than rom, swapping romance for raunch and witty banter for jokes about bodily fluids. According to a recent study, millennials are having less sex than ever – but in these movies, it’s more that there’s an absence of intimacy rather than a lack of sex.