Every now and then a film makes you fall in love with cinema all over again. Often it’s hard to explain why.

Maybe it’s the glimmering, burnished beauty of the cinematography. Maybe it’s the guiding hand of the director, at once soft in its sympathy and merciless in its collision of two doomed souls.

It’s definitely in the acting, with Blanchett and Mara two fragile diamonds, hard-edged and irreconcilable even in their passion.

Every element of Carol serves to complicate, beatify, or forbid the ferocious looks of longing that pass between Blanchett and Mara. The film lives for these moments.

There are powerful spaces, lifetimes long, between the words unsaid, the deeds undone and the loves unlived. They say more than most films.

RATING: 5/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy

DIRECTOR: Todd Haynes

WRITERS: Patricia Highsmith (novel), Phyllis Nagy (screenplay)

SYNOPSIS: Set in 1950s New York, a department-store clerk who dreams of a better life falls for an older, married woman.