Showing: 21 December 2019
Few Christmas love stories are as stylish and satisfying as Todd Haynes’s Carol, with those exquisite knit twin-sets, beribboned boxes and super-dry martinis.
Haynes’s period-specific mid-century love affair is the antithesis of what we’d expect from a feel-good holiday classic – slowly paced, reserved, full of glacial silences and quiet longing.
When the chic Carol (Cate Blanchett) asks for holiday shopping advice from a gauche young shopgirl in a Santa hat (Rooney Mara) an illicit romance blooms. The women simmer beneath their cool exteriors but are stymied by their relationships with men and Carol’s desire to keep custody of her young daughter. The chemistry is undeniable, but it’s the emotional restraint of the denouement that makes Carol all the more affecting.
“One of the most beautiful love stories ever told.” – Sophie Monks Kaufman, Little White Lies
Christmas isn’t Christmas without the ultimate festive classic from Oscar-winning director Frank Capra, starring James Stewart as despairing businessmen George Bailey.
“I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it.” In Greta Gerwig’s (Lady Bird) thrilling new telling of Louisa May Alcott’s classic 1868 novel, four young women come of age in the aftermath of the American Civil War, each determined to live life on her own terms.