It is a luminous, tender film, and while it shows horror and tragedy, it also shows great mercy and generous compassion. While much of Boys Don’t Cry reads as a scathing indictment of American intolerance, as well it should, the stirring emotional heft at its core will stay with you. Sexual repression and passionate sympathetic connection lay at the heart of Kimberly Peirce’s award-winning film of real-life trans male Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank, brilliant in an Oscar-winning role).īrandon’s budding and delicate relationship with Lana Tisdel (Chloë Sevigny) is forbidden in the puritanical Nebraska town where they live, and the abuse, rape, and tragic murder that lays in the shadows of their short-term revelry will break your heart. Not only does Romanek do Ishiguro’s book great justice, it gives the audience enough charitable comprehension, sumptuous visuals, and pretty provocations to last a lifetime. The twisted, dark, and rancorous world they live in will consume them all, in one way or another, and rarely do tales of lost youth and overwhelmed innocence resonate with such weighty magnitude. Without giving too much away, a terrible and inescapable fate awaits our protagonists, and their love is more susceptible than any of them know. Set in an alternate history, a messy love triangle develops at Hailsham, an English boarding school involving orphans Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Ruth (Keira Knightley), and Kathy (Carey Mulligan). Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian sci-fi novel is elegantly adapted into an agonizingly exquisite and hauntingly poetic film of dangerous and unrequited love from director Mark Romanek. And the chemistry between the two leads is beyond question. To spare her father’s life Belle offers herself to the Beast and from their Beast soon falls in love with her.Īstonishing effects, stunning costumes, overpowering visuals, Henri Alekan’s exemplary lensing, dreamy editing techniques, all pulsing and vibrating to its own fevered, weird, and electrical cadence, it’s a frequently nightmarish and ghoulish tear-jerker. The satire is sticky, as it should be, and while this film is occasionally confused and uneven, it’s still a minor masterpiece from a major talent.Ī landmark of fabulist cinematic storytelling from the legendary avant-garde artistic polyglot Jean Cocteau comes the ultimate romantic tragedy, La Belle et la Bête.Ī reimagining of the classic fairytale Beauty and the Beast, Cocteau’s version was written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and focusses on Belle (Josette Day), who’s father (Marcel André) is sentenced to death for plucking a rose from a garden that belongs to Beast (Jean Marais). “How did they make a movie out of Lolita?” queried the print ads back in ‘62 and the answer, one supposes, is with pathos, black humor, and tragic transgression. Of course Stanley Kubrick’s take on Vladimir Nabokov’s incendiary novel was going to make this list of forbidden love films, how could it not? Middle-aged Humbert Humbert (James Mason) becomes obsessed with teenaged Dolores Haze (Sue Lyon), the titular Lolita –– here she’s a 15-year-old, as opposed to the 12-year-old she was in the novel –– and the results, depending on who you ask, are one of Kubrick’s most satisfying films, at least of his early period. Despite its racy and sensational subject matter Murmur of the Heart is a shockingly sensitive, remarkably tender, and tellingly melancholic film that ranks with Malle’s finest work.ġ5-year-old Laurent Chevalier, played brilliantly by Benoît Ferreux, is in many ways an avatar for Malle –– both suffered from heart murmurs and both opposed the First Indochina War, for starters –– and is often compared favorably to François Truffaut’s likewise autobiographical film, The 400 Blows.Īn affectionate and nostalgic tale, full of affection and warmth for its characters and it somehow manages to be virtuous even when it is taboo, Murmur of the Heart beats resolutely. Scott writing for The New York Times puts it, “both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.”įrench New Wave luminary Louis Malle’s controversial coming-of-age story embraces accidental incest in the town of Dijon. There’s something histrionic about the emotional insecurity that Birth boldly emblazons, and it makes for something of a malefic love letter, a lamentable billet-doux from a gifted director. Nicole Kidman is Anna, a Manhattan widow who slowly comes to believe the claims of a ten-year-old boy named Sean, who repeatedly tells her that he is the reincarnation of her late husband, also named Sean, who died suddenly ten years hence. Jonathan Glazer’s criminally misunderstood second feature Birth combines a sedated surrealism with a powerful meditation on belief and its connection to love and the result is a confrontational and compelling pièce de résistance.
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