It’s Valentine’s Day, and you’re looking to get into the spirit of things, but you’ve already seen all the tried-and-true classics like “Love Actually,” “When Harry Met Sally” and “It Happened One Night.”

So rather than waste your time with the same familiar favorites every movie critic will recommend, we’re going off the beaten path for romantic films featuring more unorthodox depictions of love affairs, one for Valentine’s Day and one for each remaining day of February.

1. True Romance (1993)

She’s a Tallahassee call girl and he’s a Detroit comic book store clerk who’s obsessed with Elvis, and after the cutest of meet-cutes, they hit the road to unload her dead pimp’s drugs and stay one step ahead of both the mob and the cops.

Christian Slater has never been cooler, Patricia Arquette has never been more adorable, and what’s amazing is how believable their endearing love affair remains, even as each new plot twist grows more improbable and adrenaline-driven, thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s crackerjack script and the shark-like momentum of Tony Scott’s direction.

I could write an entire story about the insanely overqualified supporting cast alone, but keep an eye out for a pre-“Sopranos” James Gandolfini as a hauntingly meditative hitman.

2. Wild at Heart (1990)

As close to a “straight” love story as the non-Euclidean angles of David Lynch’s mind are capable of delivering, this surrealist country-fried take on “The Wizard of Oz” can be experienced but never properly explained.

Lynch gets great mileage out of casting real-life mother-daughter duo Diane Ladd and Laura Dern in this gritty noir fable of a domineering mother determined to kill her daughter’s hoodlum boyfriend, the latter played by Nicolas Cage with an Elvis Presley-esque sneer of his own.

As ugly as this film gets, with Lynch’s usual crew of recurring weirdo character actors rendered particularly grotesque here, its denouement explicitly calls upon Cage’s weak-willed ne’er-do-well to choose the redemption of love and commitment.

3. Pump Up the Volume (1990)

Slater returns to this list as an anonymous, foul-mouthed pirate radio DJ who can’t find the courage to speak out in his day-to-day life as a high school student until he connects with an inquisitive classmate, played by Samantha Mathis, who’s written him filthy letters as an adoring and equally depraved fan.

While the film’s profanity-laden language and deliberately unsubtle political statements are downright confrontational, its more low-key moments depict adolescence as a paradoxical period of shared loneliness, with even its boldest characters hiding behind microphones or handwriting to give voice to what they can’t say face-to-face.

This is still the best acting performance of Slater’s career, and in an era of online social media, its portrayal of the communal yet faceless isolation of adolescence is as relevant as ever.

4. Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)

Even as the ’80s-era oeuvre of John Hughes has earned a much-deserved resurgence, this film remains stubbornly overlooked in favor of fare such as “Sixteen Candles” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

On its face, it’s a gender-reversed “Pretty in Pink” in which a less-entitled Duckie gets the girl, with average-guy teenager Eric Stoltz pursuing high-school queen Lea Thompson, until he realizes his tomboyish best friend, played by Mary Stuart Masterson, is the one he’s truly loved all along.

Unlike some of Hughes’ other teen dramas from that decade, which haven’t aged as well, “Some Kind of Wonderful” treats both of the female leads in its love triangle with respect and affection, with Thompson’s social butterfly eventually empathizing with Stoltz, Masterson and their fellow misfits.

5. L.A. Story (1991)

As the title telegraphs, this film intended to be the singular send-up of all the narcissistic absurdities of Los Angeles in the 1980s, with Steve Martin presiding over its broad satire with a deftly droll touch. But somewhere along the way, it becomes an affecting and even spiritual exploration of what it means to love someone.

Martin’s character is tired of his meaningless life as a TV meteorologist in a city so characteristically sunny it renders weathermen useless, until he starts receiving messages from a freeway traffic sign that seem to be life advice specifically for him.

Sarah Jessica Parker elicits big laughs as a shamelessly shallow younger model that Martin hooks up with, but we see his yearning for something more profound with a London journalist played by Victoria Tennant (his real-life wife at the time), all while we’re treated to the music of Enya and observations such as, ”A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true.”

6. Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

On the zanier side of comedies about how kooky Southern California was in the ’80s, Geena Davis plays a Valley girl (her character is even named “Valerie Gail”) who’s already coping with a cheating fink of a fiance when a UFO crash-lands in her swimming pool.

The spaceship is piloted by three aliens covered in neon-hued fur, but when Davis’ fellow hairstylist Julie Brown (who co-wrote the script) gives them a trim, they turn out to be three hot guys.

Two years before they would appear together onscreen in Fox’s “In Living Color,” Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey co-starred as two-thirds of the alien trio, with their leader being played by a surprisingly suave and dashing Jeff Goldblum.

The ’80s sub-genre of “Like ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,’ but with sex” is unexpectedly rich, with films such as “Splash,” “Starman,” “Starcrossed” and even “Howard the Duck.”

But “Earth Girls Are Easy” benefits from the fact that Goldblum and Davis were actually married at the time, and their real-life chemistry suffuses their goofball characters, with a far less grisly outcome than when they co-starred in David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” two years prior.

7. Better Off Dead (1985)

Writer-director “Savage” Steve Holland is one of the few folks who could credibly transform into a cartoonish comedy the tale of a teen wanting to kill himself after his girlfriend breaks up with him. But it really helps that he cast the perpetually mopey-faced John Cusack as his hapless lead character.

Holland wasn’t just parodying the cliches of teen-targeted ’80s rom-coms to date, back when he was only halfway through the decade. He was also inventing brand-new cliches that subsequent films would employ to far lesser effect.

In the nonstop succession of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gags and endlessly quotable running jokes (“I want my $2!” “Now that’s a damn shame, when folks be throwin’ away a perfectly good white boy.”), Cusack’s character learns to put his breakup into its proper perspective, and he even finds new love waiting for him.

8. Warm Bodies (2013)

When I first heard this film described as “Twilight,” except with zombies instead of vampires, I wanted to shoot something. But what I actually got when I watched it was a delightfully canny, moving twist on “Romeo and Juliet” that manages to justify its “Power of Love” ending.

In the years since he starred in “About A Boy,” Nicolas Hoult has learned how to weaponize his alien strangeness into a winningly guileless charm, which he puts to good use as a zombie named “R,” who suddenly feels his heart literally beating again after he falls in love with a human girl named Julie, played by Teresa Palmer.

Just as zombie plagues spread from person to person like a virus, so too does the resurgence of life and human emotions start to spread through the zombies as a result of the love that grows between R and Julie.

Bonus points to Rob Corddry as R’s zombie best friend “M,” and Analeigh Tipton as Julie’s friend Nora, both of whom supply plenty of laughs on the side (“Now you’re supposed to say I’m pretty, too”).

9. Ever After (1998)

The 1990s wore its revisionary spirit on its sleeve, and this radical reinterpretation of “Cinderella” makes its motives clear by moving the age-old fairy tale’s setting up to the Renaissance era, and turning its put-upon princess into a self-rescuing damsel in distress, who we see espousing ideas that would have been almost anachronistically progressive for that time.

Years before Disney’s direct-to-video sequels did the same, Drew Barrymore’s Cinderella successfully redeems one of her two “ugly stepsisters,” played by the actually quite fetching Melanie Lynskey, even as her wicked stepmother (Anjelica Huston, clearly having the time of her life with the role) and her other stepsister are consigned to a deservingly dire fate for their mistreatment of her.

And Barrymore’s Cinderella not only effects her own rescue after being sold to a lecherous landowner played by Richard O’Brien (“Say hello, Riff!”), but she also broadens the mind of her Prince Charming.

All this, and we get to see Leonardo da Vinci (no, really) make Cinderella’s dress for the royal ball.

10. The Fifth Element (1997)

Writer-director Luc Besson delivered what should have been the sequel to the animated 1981 classic “Heavy Metal,” transporting us to a far-future outer space packed with enough background mythology for a dozen sci-fi franchises.

An evil force prophesied by the ancient Egyptians has returned from the far reaches of the cosmos to destroy the earth in the 23rd century, and the only thing standing in its way is a shell-shocked war-veteran-turned-taxi-driver named Korben Dallas (Hi, Bruce Willis!) and a girl without a past named Leeloo (the ethereally attractive Milla Jovovich) who tells him she’s “the Fifth Element” of legend.

This is one of the few action-romance films where both halves of the couple pull equal duty in both fighting scenes and emotional breakdowns. Jovovich’s Leeloo is a flawless combatant who is nonetheless horrified by war, and Willis’ Korben Dallas is a reflexively effective soldier who has to get over his own emotional damage to open his heart to Leeloo.

11. Krull (1983)

So, let’s say it’s the 1980s again, and they’ve stopped making “Star Wars” films, but they’re still decades away from starting the ”Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and you kind of want something in between, an epic sci-fi fantasy with swords and monsters and magic and comely princesses in need of rescuing.

This is basically the target market that “Krull” was hoping to hit, but what earns it a place on this list is that the alien Beast — who has invaded the planet Krull and stolen Lyssa (Lysette Anthony at the peak of her hotness) from Prince Colwyn (a suitably forthright Ken Marshall) — can’t win unless he’s sundered the young couple’s love.

The Beast re-creates Colwyn’s handsome likeness for Lyssa and sends women to seduce Colwyn away from his quest for Lyssa, but both attempts fail, because the couple’s love for one another is too pure and strong.

A fascinating subplot involves the wizard Ynyr (Freddie Jones) reconciling with his former lover, the Widow of the Web (Francesca Annis, his co-star in David Lynch’s “Dune”), as we see that the older sages are so committed to reuniting Colwyn and Lyssa because their own love had turned so sour.

12. Romancing the Stone (1984)

Before Michael Douglas made “Fatal Attraction,” thereby pioneering the “Michael Douglas has sex with the wrong woman” sub-genre of film, he was a credible contender for the sort of rugged man-of-action roles that his equally square-jawed father, Kirk Douglas, filled out so naturally.

Douglas does his best Indiana Jones impression as Jack Colton, a roguish smuggler who crosses the path of lonely big-city romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner when she was, in the words of Jim Carrey as “The Mask,” s-s-s-smokin’), when she gets stranded in Colombia.

Joan finds herself living out an adventure straight out of one of her own novels, in the company of a man who bears a striking resemblance to how she writes her leading men, with the joke being that the same traits Joan finds so appealing in her fictional fantasy men are infuriating to her when she has to deal with them in real life.

Add Danny DeVito as a rival smuggler to Jack, and you have the birth of the Douglas-Turner-DeVito comedy trio, which would carry on through “The Jewel of the Nile” and “War of the Roses.”

13. Dead Again (1991)

Hey, it’s Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson! With Sir Derek Jacobi! But in a film that’s not a Shakespeare adaptation! And, oh my God, is that Robin Williams? What the hell?

“Dead Again” is a head-trip of a neo-noir murder mystery, with amnesia and hypnosis and reincarnation and memories of past lives and the recurring imagery of lethal scissors, but for all its plot twists and red herrings, its central questions are these:

Is our fate predetermined? If two souls have fallen in love before, can they change how things will work out between them in their next lives? Or are they doomed to repeat the same tragic outcomes?

I won’t spoil the plot, because its constant switchbacks keep you on your toes. Branagh, Thompson and Jacobi all lend the proceedings an outsized operatic air, and Williams is laugh-out-loud hilarious in a role that feels like his character just randomly wandered onto set from a completely different film.

14. Blind Date (1987)

It’s “The Return of Bruno” to the list (sorry, couldn’t resist the reference) as Bruce Willis co-stars with a young Kim Basinger in a Blake Edwards-directed screwball farce.

Willis plays Walter, an overworked yuppie whose frantic efforts go unappreciated by the impersonal company he works for, and who dreams of becoming a rhythm-and-blues musician (a dream shared in real life by Willis, who would go on to record the album “The Return of Bruno” in 1987).

Walter’s mild-mannered existence is turned upside down when his brother Ted (the sadly departed Phil Hartman of “NewsRadio” and “Saturday Night Live” fame) arranges a date with Nadia (the aforementioned Basinger), while warning him that, if Nadia gets drunk, “she loses control.”

This proves to have far less sexy connotations than Walter anticipated, since Nadia manages to get him fired from his job and his car destroyed, all while they’re being stalked by her jealous ex-boyfriend (John Larroquette of NBC’s “Night Court”).

In the end, though, a little destruction turns out to be what Walter’s life probably needed.

Bonus: The Crow (1994)

You’ll note I’ve tried to select films that feature their romances in the present tense, and relatively central to the plot, with fairly uplifting resolutions.

The romantic relationship in “The Crow” is over before the film even starts, as Eric Draven and his fiancee, Shelly Webster, are found dead on Devil’s Night in Detroit, the day before their wedding, and one year before Eric returns from the dead as the titular Crow.

But the emotional heft of Brandon Lee’s performance, as Eric, is how he invests every gesture with an all-encompassing grief, over having lost the one person in the world he loved the most.

Whether he’s playing the Crow as vengeful or remorseful, Lee comes across at every moment as bone-tired, just from the effort of being alive.

You see it in the smallest details, such as when Ernie Hudson, as the lone cop who’s on his side, asks if he’s going to vanish into thin air. When Lee replies, “I thought I’d use your front door,” his voice is practically choking back sobs, and his eyes are glassy with unshed tears.

This is a man whose lost love has left him hurting, so much so that you feel relieved for him when he finally lays down to die for a second time.

Another great thing about “The Crow” is that it’s also a perfect Halloween film, so, like “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” it’s versatile.