Orlando

Wildly inventive and very playful. I love how it toys with gender roles, time, and the fourth wall. And all with sparkling wit and whimsy and insight. Tilda Swinton is absolutely terrific in it. It greatly resembles a Peter Greenaway work, not only in its conception but also in the music and the production design. The film is quite beautiful. However, the very end was a letdown. Not enough to ruin the whole experience, but that final moment really just didn't work at all for me.

A film about the unstoppable tide of progress over four centuries, with Tilda Swinton as the gender-bent lead whose navigation of British high society leaves them torn between love and privilege, freedom and equality. The painstaking production design lampoons the pomp theatricality of aristocracy without making too fine a point of it, and its attitudes towards gender are still ahead of their time over two decades later. A delightful combination of radical content and formalist design.

Amazing book, horrible movie.

A brilliant film about finding out who you are, despite the labels that people tend to give you. Tilda Swinton is amazing.

Minus a point for Jimmy Somerville singing in the sky at the end, otherwise completely amazing. Almost like watching The New World and a Hal Hartley movie at the same time (no i'm not even kidding), or like a feminized Greenaway (i.e. more humane and lyrical, but still very formalized and conceptual), which actually makes a lot of sense since Potter used a bunch of his collaborators on this film. Basically this is the movie Sophia Coppola wishes she had made with Marie Antoinette.