Female Film Critics 24/375
Passing moves slowly, allowing time to admire the period furniture, brownstones, and filmy, dropped-waist dresses. The film’s pace is as deceptive as the characters’ lives. Rebecca Hall’s Passing expands Nella Larson’s story beyond the Nineteen-Twenties into the Twenty-Twenties.
Read more
Based on Nella Larsen’s same-named novella, Rebecca Hall’s powerful 1920s-set directorial debut, Passing, tells the story of two friends — Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga) — who unexpectedly reunite after a long separation, only to discover that their lives have taken very different trajectories. As it reveals what happens after their paths re-cross, the film examines complex issues related to race, identity, marriage, motherhood, and more.
Read more
Passing is Rebecca Hall’s beautifully realized directorial debut. Written, produced, and directed by Hall, the film is an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 eponymous novel about two Black women who were best friends during their childhood days in Harlem and who, after having gone their separate ways for decades, are accidentally reunited in the tea room of a downtown NYC hotel.
Read more
Shot in black and white that is, so effectively, mostly shades of gray, “Passing” is an extraordinary period drama that delicately imagines the interior lives of two women as they grapple with issues of race, identity and belonging.
Read more
There is a tension running through Passing that is mirrored in Tessa Thompson’s performance: the stiffness in her jaw, the tightness between her eyes, the rigidity of her spine. As the audience, we understand. It is the result of lies so brittle a whisper could break them apart. And if we are Black that tension goes beyond empathy, it is recognition. In the Rebecca Hall film, adapted from the lauded novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen, Tessa Thompson nd Ruth Negga are a pair of reunited friends. Both from uptown, both wives, both well-to-do; one white presenting and the other “passing” for white.
Read more
Actor Rebecca Hall has chosen to make her directorial debut with a screen adaptation of Passing, a celebrated novella written in 1929 by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen about the phenomenon of passing for white among light-skinned African Americans. Passing doesn’t live on the surface of its subject, but instead bores into the costs of living a lie. And passing is only one kind of lie.
Read more
Shot in black and white, Passing tells the tale of two childhood friends reuniting. Clare and Irene grew up in the same circle in Harlem. After a chance run-in at a hotel, Irene discovers that Clare had been passing for white for years. As their friendship slowly rekindles, their lives clash through fear and the reality of 1920s New York.
Read more
“My mother was a punk rock icon”, filmmaker Celeste Bell says as the film begins. “People often ask me if she was a good mum. It’s hard to know what to say.” Beginning at the end of her mother’s life with Marianne’s funeral, Bell continues to explain how “surreal” the event was, surrounded by people who were mourning an image, while she was suffering the loss of her mother, with whom we discover as the film continues, she had a tumultuous yet ultimately warm and close relationship.
Read more
Rebecca Hall’s impassioned feature directorial debut, “Passing,” is based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name. The story depicts two Black women who were once childhood friends, Clare who ‘passes’ for white and Irene who’s troubled by her own ability to do so, who are unexpectedly reunited. Their chance encounter will change their lives forever as they are pushed to look at the world through a different lens.
Read moreAt the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s 74th annual Golden Globe Awards, La La Land took all seven awards for which
Read more