James Ivory’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is a masterpiece of understatement, and a wonderful example of how noise is not always needed for compelling drama.
Anthony Hopkins, in one of cinema’s truly great performances, plays an emotionally repressed butler who gives everything, including true love, in the service of a master who is both a moral and intellectual inferior.
Frustrating, funny and ultimately heartbreaking, this is perhaps the greatest, and certainly the quietest, story of unrequited love ever to be put on film.