Leaving

Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas (I ve Loved You So Long, Four Weddings and a Funeral) delivers another acclaimed performance in the passionate drama Leaving. When stay-at-home mom Suzanne wants to return to work, her husband agrees to remodel a garage to serve as her office. Ivan, a sexy Spanish builder, enters their lives and changes them in ways no one could have expected.

Suzanne and Ivan are irresistibly drawn together by an erotic passion that threatens to destroy her marriage, her family and everything she holds dear. Her husband will stop at nothing to destroy her first. In this thrilling romance, everyone pays a price for happiness. Kristin Scott Thomas has transformed from the ice queen of British cinema to a woman of torrid passions in French films--and Leaving may be the most torrid yet. Suzanne (Thomas) leads a pleasant but stale upper middle-class life, with two teenage children (demanding and unappreciative, as all teenagers are) and a slightly pushy husband, Samuel (Yvan Attal, My Wife Is an Actress). She has a fling with a Spanish handyman named Ivan (Sergi López, Pan's Labyrinth) that, to her surprise, turns into an overwhelming passion. She can't bear to be without Ivan and decides to leave Samuel… a decision that slowly disintegrates her life. The strength of Leaving lies not in the plot, which holds no radical surprises, but in the vitality of Thomas's performance (particularly striking is a scene in which Suzanne, playfully bantering with Ivan, suddenly discovers she's in deeper emotional waters than she knew) and the cool eye writer-director Catherine Corsini casts over the events. The movie lures you into sympathy with Suzanne, yet there's always something a little unnerving about her, the sense that her mad love might have more madness than love. Thomas's career in France (including Tell No One and I've Loved You So Long) has given this superb actress a new life. --Bret Fetzer