SINGAPORE — Are you single, cynical, unromantic or just plain allergic to the impending incessant blizzard of flowers, chocolates and syrupy malarkey on Sunday? Do you think spending Valentine’s Day watching The Notebook or Notting Hill while cooing and cuddling in your significant other’s arms just isn’t your cup of tea? Don’t worry — we’ve cobbled up a special anti-V-day movie list for your consideration. It’s a list that’s so vehemently anti-romance it’ll rip the petals off all those overpriced flowers — and make you feel better about not having that warm and fuzzy feeling everyone seems to have around this time. Happy Valentine’s Day!

1. FATAL ATTRACTION.

Stalking, bunny-boiling, bathtub murders… if Michael Douglas’ extra-curricular one-night stand with an obsessed Glenn Close in Adrian Lyne’s 1987 hit movie doesn’t make you swear off casual sex altogether, we don’t know what will. The film’s sexual politics are a little acrid, but its construction is so persuasive, and the performances of Douglas and Close so inspired, the film is hard to resist.

2. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD.

How do you come up with the perfect Public Service Announcement for singlehood? By reuniting arguably the world’s favourite movie couple (Titanic’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) to play a husband-and-wife tandem who are both terrible for and to each other. Suburban malaise has seldom looked better than in director Sam Mendes’ woefully depressing adaptation of Richard Yates’ chronicle of a marriage tearing itself apart. It might be a discomforting watch but the powerful performances in this potently restrained domestic drama about self-aggrandizement and delusion will undoubtedly make you reflect on your own life choices. Raw and strong, it’s a tough tonic, of Titanic proportions, for anyone to swallow.

3. THE WAR OF THE ROSES.

Director Danny DeVito reunites his Romancing The Stone / Jewel Of The Nile co-stars Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner for this pitch-black 1989 comedy to take a gleefully nasty look at a divorcing couple willing to claw, cheat, steal and fight to the death over who comes out on top. It is truly the final act when the property battle between Barbara and Oliver Rose (Turner and Douglas) turns surreally literal, highlighting the true genius of DeVito, who mixes hilarity with discomfort and throws in a cynically violent climax that you still can’t believe they got away with. You’d be hard pressed to find a more recent Hollywood film as honest and direct as this. Now who is scared of marriage?

4. BLUE VALENTINE.

What’s more agonising than watching a married couple systematically fall apart? Having it pitilessly juxtaposed with how they got together in the first place. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s punishing drama, starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a once crazy-in-love couple, is a raw look at the ugly disintegration of that hallowed union between a man and a woman. Not just a hard and unforgiving movie, this Oscar-nominated indie is also a brilliant and spectacularly acted one as well, thanks to the excellent work by the performers.

5. WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Playwright Edward Albee’s words were always magnificent for both stage and screen, but it is the legendary performances from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that truly bring the vitriolic honesty and scathing bitterness of the impeccable source material to the surface. Many believe the Hollywood couple modelled their performances on their real-life tumultuous relationship, which consequently resulted in the ultimate portrait of a crumpled marriage. This grandfather of all “to hell with love” anti-romantic movies also serves as the perfect calling card for the illustrious Mike Nichols — it marks his directorial debut.

6. CLOSER.

As expected, nearly four decades after Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, and thirty-plus years after the similarly scorching Carnal Knowledge, the master gender-based warfare director Mike Nichols does it again in yet another piercing film adaptation of a play. This time, it’s Patrick Marber’s piece that’s brought to the silver screen, with Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Clive Owen and Natalie Portman delivering masterclass performances on secrets and lies, bitterness and pain. You know, your everyday portrait of mercenary narcissists who deserve each other.

7. LAST TANGO IN PARIS.

It’s not just the sex okay? Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 classic is an incessantly depressing examination of mid-life crisis, emotional turmoil, eroticism, sexual obsession and violence — alongside your basic topics of pig vomit and bestiality — culminating in one of the more definitive rejections seen in film history.