The Invisible Woman

Directed by Ralph Fiennes

(R)

***

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It turns out that “classic filmmaking done with passion, sensitivity, and intelligence” can still blow viewers away, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. In a movie he directed, Ralph Fiennes plays a middle-aged Charles Dickens as the celebrity novelist embarks on an affair with an actress 27 years his junior, and Fiennes wisely seems to have insisted on depicting the drama from all angles. “You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of The Invisible Woman,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times, “but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film.” Fiennes has never been more charismatic, and Felicity Jones so patiently reveals Nelly Ternan’s character that “observing her is like watching a plant whose buds slowly bloom over time.” Unfortunately, the affair “isn’t much of a story—at least, not as realized here,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. We never even learn the nature of Dickens’s attraction to Ternan—or why a sexual liaison would cause an ebullient man to turn suddenly “mute and stricken.”