Carol (15) Four stars

Dir: Todd Haynes

With: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson

Runtime: 119 minutes

IF Todd Haynes’ drama was a Christmas gift it would be contained in one of those guides headlined “For the person who has everything”. (Who are those awful people anyway? Couldn’t they find a little corner in their fabulous lives for world peace and an end to suffering?). Luxuriously appointed, sumptuously drawn, achingly poignant, backed by the Weinstein Company, Carol is one of the season’s big ticket items and is sure to be recognised as such come Oscar nomination time.

Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, it is the story of rich, suburban housewife Carol (Cate Blanchett) who takes a shine to a Manhattan shop assistant by the name of Therese (played by Rooney Mara). Theirs is a love that dare not speak its name in Fifties America, and Carol, being a wife and mother, has much to lose if it progresses beyond coffee and cigarettes. Can a love like this last, or should it be returned to the shop like an unwanted festive gift?

It is a pleasure to watch Blanchett, Mara and Haynes try to arrive at an answer. Haynes (I’m Not There, Far From Heaven, and the TV mini-series Mildred Pierce), and his cinematographer, Edward Lachman, know how to put on a show. If you thought Mad Men offered a brilliantly meticulous evocation of the period, prepare to drool double over Carol, her shoes, her coat, Therese’s darling little bobble hat, the cars, the whole shebang.

Though Carol depicts a grand passion looking for a home, its key quality, besides the visuals, is its restraint. Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay approaches the relationship between the women like any other love affair, even though all the while we know the stakes are higher in this case. In taking this approach, the film could not have two more suitable actors than Blanchett and Mara, one a movie goddess already, the other one in the making, both mistresses of the close up, where emotions should move across the face with the ease of a silk scarf. It is up to them to make love at a low peep light up the screen like a towering inferno, and they do.

In Haynes’ picture, men do get a look in - with Kyle Chandler particularly good as Carol’s devoted but bewildered husband - but their stories are purely footnotes in the living, breathing novel that is unfolding around the women. There are so few movies that dare to build themselves around female leads that Carol comes across as outrageously daring. It should not be, but there we are.

While Cate Blanchett has not been off her form in living memory, nor Rooney Mara for that matter, the same cannot be said for Keef Richards’ impersonator and one time acting firecracker Johnny Depp. But every American acting life deserves a second act, and having sunk into parody in Pirates of the Caribbean, and turned in a wish you weren’t here performance in The Tourist, the What’s Eating Gilbert Grape star is back on blistering form in Black Mass (four stars, 123 minutes).

Scott Cooper’s crime drama is the true-life tale of Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger. With his shades, his blouson jacket, his near bald bonce and skinny jeans, Depp’s take on the neighbourhood psycho who was always good to his ma and knew how to play the system, is gripping, impossible to look away from, fare.

The drama itself is not without cliche, not least in its setting. Between The Departed, The Town, and other pictures, the streets and stories of the South Side of Boston, complete with thick as bean soup accent, are becoming rather too familiar. Every actor in the piece has a go at it pounding the vowels like some blue collar Kennedy, with Australian actor Joel Edgerton, playing an FBI agent who also hails from the ‘hood, coming off worst.

Still, there is always Depp to enjoy. An added bonus is Benedict Cumberbatch as Whitey’s politician brother. Between them, and a story so wild it could have come from the pages of pulp fiction, Black Mass delivers on most counts.