A SINGLE MAN

Actor Colin Firth provides one of the year’s great performances as an elegant, wry Englishman privately mourning the love of his life. Fashion designer Tom Ford makes his directorial debut with a ravishing adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s portrait of desire and loss in early 60s LA.

“A sorrowful beauty infuses every frame of this remarkable debut… A Single Man visits a single day in the life of gay Brit expat George Falconer (Colin Firth), a teacher at a Los Angeles college who plans on suicide to end his pain over the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode). The film is stunningly visualized, with Ford achieving a feeling for light and texture to rival Wong Kar-wai's. Life with Jim is seen in black-and-white flashbacks that contrast vividly with the rich color palette of his present encounters, notably with Kenny, beautifully played by Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy), a student whose interests exceed the academic, and his British friend Charley (Julianne Moore), a divorcee who fantasizes that George will marry her. Moore is explosively good, especially in her drunk scene. But the film belongs to Firth. Uncanny at showing the heart crumbling under George's elegant exterior, he gives the performance of his career. Ford is a true visionary, but it's his humanity that gives the love story a ravishing, bruised grandeur.” — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

“Ford, the Austin, Texas, fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci, financed his first feature himself. The director turned out to be a good investment for the producer. Nuance, not flash, is his forte… Ford is also attentive to the varieties of Southern California sunlight, which lends A Single Man an orangey warmth that should touch all who see the picture. But it's Firth's performance, as a man bereft, for whom solitude is a life sentence, that will win audience's hearts.” — Richard Corliss, Time

“We're always looking for those performances that truly define an actor, where we can sit back and simply watch the talent soar. For Colin Firth, A Single Man is that film.” — Betsey Sharkey, LA Times