My partner, Solomon, and I still argue about Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2000 romance, “Love & Basketball.” The movie tells the story of Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps), which begins with Monica’s family moving in next door to Quincy’s when they are both 11, follows them as their friendship turns to courtship right before they graduate high school and start playing basketball at U.S.C. Once in college, they juggle off-court drama (Quincy learns that his pro-athlete father has impregnated a woman outside his marriage), and on-court demands (Monica fights to earn her spot as the starting point guard).

These pressures come to a head when Quincy asks Monica to stay up late to help him process his parents’ marital crisis, and Monica, worried about her place on the team, returns to her dorm to make curfew. Dejected, Quincy ultimately decides to leave Monica and college and go pro. Monica, meanwhile, ends up playing basketball in Spain. Years later, they meet again in Los Angeles, and after she loses a pickup game to him, she wins his heart and a starting spot on the Sparks.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as black directors turned to black romances in “Love Jones,” “The Best Man,” “Brown Sugar” and other films, “Love & Basketball” stood out even more for featuring black characters whose ambition (Monica) and craving for domestic bliss (Quincy) challenged traditional gender norms. At the heart of the disagreement between Monica and Quincy — and for that matter, Solomon and me — was our generation’s gender wars gone buppie: Could Monica really win the boy next door, play ball and have it all?

A new crop of heterosexual black love stories — including “The Photograph,” “Premature” and the series “Cherish the Day” — by black filmmakers answers that question with a definitive yes. Though they pay homage to Prince-Bythewood’s vision with African-American female leads as complex, cosmopolitan and curious as Monica, the central conflict of these new stories is whether their characters can work through personal trauma, break free of the “strong black woman” stereotype, and be vulnerable enough to love themselves and their partners. In line with a larger recognition of black women’s multidimensionality in American culture and politics, never once do their male partners make them feel bad for dreaming big: their ambition is their appeal.