Dreaming of Joseph Leeds

A Phoenix pick

Some may well be dreaming before Eric Styles's languorous period oddity is over, though not necessarily of Joseph Lees. Those who remain awake will be rewarded by a mannered treatment of pathological relationships, a kind of Wessex Ethan Frome that trades the sled for a sawmill. Samantha Morton, vivid last year in as a self-destructive teen in Under the Skin (she won the best-actress award from the Boston Film Critics), here is almost unrecognizable as Eva, a repressed woman in a 1950s English backwater with a crush on her cousin of the title (Rupert Graves), a one-legged geologist in Italy. A local pig farmer (Lee Ross) with severe passive/aggressive problems woos her in the meantime, and she succumbs just as Joseph re-enters her life. An unlikely merging of Thomas Hardy, Peter Greenaway, and Merchant/Ivory, Dreaming is alternately enervating and powerfully performed. Screens at the Copley Place Saturday, September 11 at 6:45 and 9 p.m. and Sunday, September 12 at 11 a.m. and 1:30 and 4 p.m.

-- Peter Keough

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Film Festival Feature Films

| The Minus Man | The Tavern | Black Eyed Dog | The Last September | A Wake in Providence | Man of the Century | Pups | Dreaming of Joseph Leeds | Wisdom of Crocodiles | That's The Way I Like It | American Beauty | Mifune | Black Cat, White Cat | Hit and Runway | All the LIttle Animals | Me Myself I | The Alchemist and the Virgin | Trash | Old Man River | The Poet and the Con | Snow Falling on Cedars | Guinevere | East is East | American Movie | Rivers of Babylon | Two Ninas | Rats | Keepers of the Frame | The Runner |

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More Boston Film Festival information, film descriptions, and show times

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