Carol

As in almost every love story ever shown on screen, there is a moment in Todd Haynes's Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, when the eyes of two strangers meet across a crowded room. Against the bustling backdrop of a New York department store at Christmas, Rooney Mara's shop-girl, Therese, catches sight of Carol (Cate Blanchett) lingering by a toy train set. Carol is older, wears expensive fur coats, and drinks martinis at lunchtime. These women are worlds apart, separated not only by the desk between retailer and customer, but also by age, class, and the quietly shifting social conditions of the 1950s.

This decade is sumptuously rendered in a cocktail of drowsy interiors, jingling piano refrains, and Sandy Powell's impeccable selection of costumes. It is one of the best-looking films I have had the pleasure of watching at the cinema, its colours and textures magnified by Edward Lachman's measured cinematography. The camera closes in on fussing hands and plaintive looks, little details that speak volumes about the two women's burgeoning, forbidden attraction.

Cate Blanchett is imperious as Carol. She slinks and prowls across the screen, redolent of a watchful lioness as she pursues the doe-eyed Therese. But she is by no means without her vulnerabilities, caught in the midst of a painful divorce, and on the cusp of a traumatic custody battle. Haynes could easily have created a definitive power imbalance between these two women, but this is a trap he avoids. At times, Mara's Therese reflects the image of Carol's daughter, with the same neat bob and chequered dresses. But she also resists the pitfalls of such a dynamic. Therese has her own ambitions: she wants to be a photographer, and, living alone in New York, she has a certain independence that eludes her older lover.

These are the subtle nuances of character that make this adaptation so compelling. As Carol's estranged husband Harge, Kyle Chandler could have been a stock villain, jealously berating his wife for her infidelities, and threatening legal consequences. Yet our sympathies lie in part with him, as with Therese's hapless boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy), who confidently reels off half-baked psychoanalysis when Therese tries to talk to him about homosexual love. In Carol, Haynes shows us how the historic persecution of gay men and women has left only victims, scapegoats, and a trail of broken hearts.    

Thankfully, a lot of the cliches associated with lesbian fiction and films are avoided. It's not giving too much away to say that the conclusion is not entirely miserable. What is undoubtedly a difficult love is not fetishised into impossibility, and neither woman sheepishly crawls back to her man. The affair between Carol and Therese, although passionate and convincing, is a slow-burner, shadowed by a tentative uncertainty that feels true to the period. Carol is a masterpiece: deliciously crafted, beautifully acted, and singing with details that furnish its characters with the desires and frustrations of real lives.

Macbeth

Scotland herself is the main character in this blood-soaked reimagining of Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. So enamoured is director Justin Kurzel of his Highland landscape that it becomes his focal point: a gaping maw of brutal heights and contours before the poor players. This is a cold pagan place, where the respite from war and rain is never very long.

From the opening scene-- a child's funeral --we discover a country of hope murdered in its infancy. Power is wielded by a clutch of men, whose in-fighting has led to continuous conflict for Scotland's people. Michael Fassbender's eponymous hero is gladiatorial: a fiercely rugged and committed Thane (of Glamis, Cawdor etc.) whose noble spirit turns sickly with untamed ambition. This is very much a Macbeth about men-at-war, a reading that Kurzel follows through effectively, albeit at the cost of some of the play's best and strangest elements.

The 'weird sisters' are not so very weird at all. They appear on the fringes of the battlefield as wandering mothers, accompanied by their children and whispering prophecies that always sound closer to prayers than incantations. Indeed, the famous coven scene with its fabulous potion-brewing is sliced from the text; instead, Macbeth wanders through a field of ghostly soldiers, whose deaths haunt him throughout the film.

The substitution of the witch for the apparition is a crucial one. Shakespeare's supernatural solicitings get short shrift here, and this is nowhere more evident than in the characterisation of Lady Macbeth. It ought to be one of the very best roles in the entire canon, and the ever-impressive Marion Cotillard does what she can within the confines of the direction. But this is a wraithlike portrait of a grieving mother, not a guilt-ridden murderess, for whom the 'damned spot' is an infant's smallpox rather than a bloodstain. The raven himself is silent as Kurzel foolishly crops her stunning first soliloquy, a move symptomatic of the broader effacement women suffer in this film.

Visually, however, Macbeth is magnificent. The country's storm-tormented glens and verges are a topology of the play's bitter and hallucinatory psychology, forming an apt counterpoint to Macbeth's frenzied decline. Fury builds through the slow-motion scenes of slaughter, and an attention to the rituals of war: the application of paint, and the assembling of weapons. In his soldierly interpretation, Fassbender is an outstanding Macbeth. His readings are underplayed and natural, yet full of ire beneath a hardened countenance. The final scenes of grief-stricken madness are particularly powerful, as he prepares to fight again with the ashes of a fiery Dunsinane blowing through the battlements.

As a war film, and a study of men and power, Kurzel's adaptation is both well-acted and engrossing. But so much of the original play is framed by the plotting and prophesying of women, and the supernatural summons Cotillard's Lady Macbeth whispers in her bedroom ought really to be cackled from the ramparts.

Still Alice

Loss is something we all fear. Losing time; losing out to others; losing things or people we love. Being at a loss for words. Being simply at a loss. If modern experiences are defined very much in terms of accumulation -- of money, friends, tweets and retweets -- how does one go about living whilst operating at a deficit?

Still Alice is a film that attempts to answer this question. It takes a look at how people measure their lives in moments, which can slip away without warning. Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, who discovers at the age of fifty that she is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. For a woman whose vocation is language, semantics, the taxonomies of the mind, the looming prospect of a total mental disconnect is particularly appalling. What her neurologist calls her 'resourcefulness' in accounting for her memory deficiencies up until this point may even make her inevitable decline more rapid. Her ability to outwit herself must come to an abrupt end. 

As always, Julianne Moore is a luminous on-screen presence. She elevates what could have been a maudlin and sentimental study of mental illness into something that has a bit more weight. In the early scenes at the hospital, she deftly captures the attitude an intellectual like Alice adopts towards any kind of exam: a steely competitiveness fuelled by a desire to impress. Her realisation that this is not a test she can hope to pass is a moment of sickening finality. 

That is not to say that Still Alice is unbearably depressing. There is an undercurrent of quite dark humour that could have been better exploited. The occasions when Alice uses her Alzheimer's for the purposes of manipulation offer refreshing antidotes to the prevailing sense of deterioration. There are ways for a person who has lost so much to get back in the game. But the film quickly settles into a predictable and quite uninventive rhythm. It's not as hard to watch as it should be; nor is its emotional kick well earned. Everything feels far too sanitised: the glossy middle-class lifestyles; the nuclear family with the not very problematic 'problem' child; the milestones of crisis and catharsis. Perceptibly, we move away from the real horror and complexity of what is unfolding. Unless you count the very real horror of watching Kristen Stewart attempt a scene from Chekhov's Three Sisters. Someone, somewhere, must stop her.

It is highly likely that Moore will win an oscar for this performance, and it is absolutely impossible to begrudge her the success. She is one of the very best at what she does. Still Alice is not, however, up to the standard she sets. When the last word of a script is 'love,' you know the screenwriters have become lazy. A film committed to one woman's experience of loss should know better than to go for such easy victories.

The Theory of Everything

A new year; another biopic. After the disappointment of The Imitation Game, I was a bit worried that James Marsh's chronicle of the life of Stephen Hawking might fall into some of the same traps. Here is another study of a brilliant but troubled Cambridge academic, an awards-bait vehicle for its young male British star. But thankfully, that's where the similarities end. The Theory of Everything is a surprisingly wonderful take on Hawking's first marriage, a relationship extraordinary in its rarity yet all too painfully human.

This is a transformative moment for Eddie Redmayne, perhaps best known until now for his work in Les Misérables and My Week With Marilyn. He excels in the daunting task of playing the world-famous physicist, from his early days as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge to the later stages of his career, when his body had been ravaged by the effects of Motor Neurone Disease. It is his performance in this latter part of the film that is truly remarkable: anger, frustration, and sharp bursts of humour are rendered with the simple lift of an eyebrow, or the wry raising of a hand.

But this is not just Hawking's story; in many ways, it belongs here to his wife Jane, portrayed by Felicity Jones. Marsh's film tracks their relationship from its awkward inception at a university party (Cambridge has changed little in fifty years) to the marriage that finally cracked under its own unique strain. The early scenes, shot largely in the beautiful grounds of St John's college, are bathed in the glow of a youth that looked certain to be cut short. Hawking's crushing diagnosis handed him a two-year life expectancy, a prediction Jane staunchly refused to see as a death sentence.

It would have been easy for this film to go down the 'love is a cure' route. Yet it is a much better and more honest film for resisting it. Because love is also weak, and jealous, and has really bad days. If Redmayne is outstanding as a man essentially fighting against his own body, Jones is more than his equal as the wife who is both his partner and his carer. Her struggle for an identity of her own in this relationship is as much the film's concern as Hawking's odds-defying survival and illustrious career. Jones's performance is a masterful exercise in restraint; it hints at underlying despair yet is alive with courage.

Without resorting to sentimentality, Marsh's biopic weaves a narrative of ordinary joys and frailties from its exceptional subject matter. What finally emerges is a hope that the world in its infinite variety has space for countless ways of living, with the many kinds of happiness they might afford.