Popular reviews

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  Review by ✨Angelica Jade Bastién🔮 ★★★★½ 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  fuck yes! this is cinema, baby! the script bursts with empathy and rich character psychology. beautiful play of light and shadow. the performances are pitch perfect and full of feeling. but it’s claude rains who stands above the rest with an intense, beguiling performance of a character who in another film would be painted broadly as an unfeeling antagonist particularly due to his view of love and marriage (which i agree with! love takes many forms, y’all!). i was particularly struck by the ending when ann todd’s character nearly commits suicide jumping in front of a train before claude sweeps her in his embrace. there’s a tremulous, sweet quality to the ending that made my heart swell and reminded me of how much of a romantic i am. isn’t it wonderful to watch something that inspires you to love life (and those in it) with full bodied intensity?

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  Review by Chris 🦑 ★★★★★ 4

  “....Home?”
  “If you want to, that is”

  This might be the most revealing thing I ever write on here but here it is: The attempt to reconcile the need for independence, security, safety, mutual companionship/affection (what I’ve always thought I wanted) and the desire to be swept away in a grand romance, to lose yourself in someone else no matter what the future holds (what I’ve been grappling with during this romance marathon for the past 2-3 weeks) is something I’ve never really thought about before until I was presented with it here in such a deeply affecting way. Now I realize that, because of what I’ve been going through in the past few weeks, it may certainly become an issue I need to seriously put thought into. I don’t think I’m ready to yet, but I hope I will be eventually.

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  Review by Evan T ★★★★½ 2

  Brief Encounter 2.5. After hearing PTA reference this forgotten Lean classic as a primary influence on Phantom Thread, I knew I had to get around to it eventually, and boy am I glad I did. If you appreciated the snow-capped mountains, 50s Britain backdrop and New Years sequence of Anderson’s 2017 masterpiece, The Passionate Friends is the place to be. It’s not quite as weepy as Brief Encounter, the tragedy being stunted by an eventual catharsis, but that didn’t stop my girlfriend from bawling her eyes out when the screen finally faded to black. As with any Lean picture, this is truly visionary, and the camera is always exactly where it needs to be. You can’t help but fall for…

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  Review by KYK ★★★★

  a rush of the heart, to the balcony, to the train tracks

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  Review by Justine Smith ★★★★½

  A film about the tension between freedom and obligation. Below the surface of passion though, an innate loneliness and unfamiliarity. These are two lovers who barely know each other and have different expectations of love. I love the scenes when Mary and Stephen are together, but the voiceover kicks in, or a daydream. The passion that exists between them hinges on a kind false visions of each other. They can only see what they want, their desire clouding flaws, contradictions, and incompatibility. The bloom of wanting as inspiring as it is destructive.

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★ 6

  Dreams that make you feel alive. The Passionate Friends is a story of love across years, always struggling, and told with a fragmented narrative. This is cinema made with emotion and edited in a dreamlike manner. David Lean tackles similar topics to Brief Encounter - a married woman loves another man - but goes further and uses less subtlety in The Passionate Friends. It is a film of indecision, of romance vs pragmatism, disguised as a loving friend and a cold husband. She wants love and security, even if she can't have both. She wants to live her own life, independent of anyone else, but also wants to love and share that with someone. The three respectable leads are all…

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  Review by Disgustipated ★★★★

  An overhead shot of a riotous ballet of revelers celebrating New Years Eve zooms in to focus on a couple dancing among the crowd. Alternately, the camera lets us join another couple in a box seat on the mezzanine above the rambunctious party. Our attention is reversed between each couple as one half of each couple preternaturally isolate one another from within the chaos of the celebrations.

  Elemental forces across time and space ensure that their passionate love has never been forgotten. All that is required is physical proximity to bind the two lovers back together again. Steven (Trevor Howard ) and Mary (Ann Todd ) clearly share a special connection. Even so, forsaking passion and romantic love with Steven,…

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  Review by nora ★★★★

  there are 3 things david lean does better than anyone:
  1. pummeling marriage as an institution into the GROUND
  2. conveying the feeling of a million oblivious outsiders intruding on the most intimate, tenuous moments in a person's life
  3. that thing of wanting to risk it all for trevor howard

  he's just a full genius

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  Review by Laura ★★★½

  didn’t pull me in nearly as much as brief encounter, but goddamn if trevor howard doesn’t have the most convincing lovestruck face. worth risking it all for imo

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  Review by Amy Hensarling ★★★★

  Claude Rains is the MVP. Steals the show. Clive Owen undeniably channels Rains’ compelling fortitude in Closer decades later, both making a strong case against the stereotypical doormat husband. Reminiscent also of Davies’ Deep Blue Sea in what all together could most aptly be categorized as a trilogy of Brits doing their damndest to express deep feeling with extreme courtesy. 

  Yes, Brief Encounter is a masterpiece, but I quite enjoyed The Passionate Friends more. The lighting mixed with shadows at just the right moments, the fog during the mountain ascension, and one of the most effective abrupt cuts I’ve ever seen turn the triangle melodrama into something worth remembering.

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  Review by sarah ★★★★ 2

  The Passionate Friends reminds me of the quiet longing in Brief Encounter (1945) mixed with the hopeful second meeting in Before Sunset (2004), and although this film is much more melodramatic in nature than the films I referenced, I still found it quite successful when it focused on the small, intimate moments between the lovers. David Lean does this so well in his films, where the characters can relax and breathe in their environments without the interference of the camera’s gaze. If it hadn’t played up to some melodramatic clichés, this film would have been perfect.

  3.75/5

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  Review by J ★★★★

  “You gave me love and kindness and loyalty. But it was the love you'd give a dog. And the kindness you'd give a beggar.”

  The daybreak of the new year steals glances on an old love. Longing is the passenger of car rides, where it ventures along the road of memories. Recollections are reflected upon the soft tremors of the water. They are smudged by the tracing glow of a dream. And not even the sanctity or security of marriage can tame the beating of a helpless heart still in love with a past lover. Is surrendering to temptation the only way to get rid of it? Is such a relationship sustainable? In invitations and trysts, the heart readily and…