This is no fault of the actress herself, whose comeliness is as self-evident and insistent as the wafting cherry blossom and the orange lanterns floating on pellucid water, the sumptuous silk of the kimono and the trimmed perfection of the formal gardens--all of which we are repeatedly encouraged to appreciate until you begin to feel that if something ugly does not appear on-screen soon you might go quite out of your mind.

the orange lanterns floating on pellucid water

[...] "I did it for my family" is the most repeated line in this film. Its echo is silent, yet you can't help hearing it: what would you do for yours?

Lean's sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and our cautious natures. It's not that the English don't want true love or self-knowledge. Rather unlike our European cousins, we will not easily give up the real for the dream. We remain skeptical about throwing away a concrete asset like Fred in favor of "the faery power of unreflecting love," no matter how much Keats may recommend it. Laura, a Midlands mother of two, is certainly not a fairy by temperament, despite her pixie face. She will not give up the reality of Fred for her love of Alec. Alec, gentleman that he is, quite agrees. An Italian (or indeed, the modern English viewer of the film) will diagnose Laura and Alec as morbidly repressed. The film offers a different hypothesis: that the possibility of two people's pleasure cannot override the certainty of other people's pain. Primum non nocere is the principle upon which the film operates. As a national motto we could do a lot worse.

Primum non nocere is the principle upon which the film operates.

a glowing review of a fine piece of agitprop leftist cinema

Gaghan's talent is for Marxist explication, demonstrating how one transaction contains within it elements of the entire system it supports.

[...] a story that in book form was an act of fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was not "Blow up the Houses of Parliament" or "Wear a white mask and knife people," for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The message of V for Vendetta is "Change is possible." In its film form this is a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the message of the first Matrix movie: the world is other than it seems. If this film makes kids think that way again, that'll be, like, totally awesome.

[...] What if the "problem" is neither genetic nor psychological, but social? For what did "women trapped in a male body" do three hundred years ago? Maybe they expanded the social category of what it is to be male so that it was expansive enough to include the "female" traits they longed for.