Breathe In

American director Drake Doremus has established himself as an accomplished director of small but incredibly powerful relationship movies. In his previous film, Like Crazy, Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin tried to conduct a transatlantic relationship, but this equally intimate offering (also starring Jones) goes into slightly murkier moral territory. Guy Pearce plays Keith, a music teacher in upstate New York who is in the early throes of a midlife crisis when British foreign-exchange student Sophie (Jones) arrives. Sophie is a precocious talent in more ways than one, and though he is impressed enough by her musical skills, Keith soon starts to see this beautiful, intelligent young woman as a soul mate and an exit route from his stale marriage to Megan (Amy Ryan). The two leads are wonderful, especially Jones as the seemingly guileless heartbreaker who may be more self-aware than she's letting on. Inevitably, it all leads to a dramatic climax, but Doremus's rich and detailed film deals exquisitely with the fallout, too, notably in the impact the affair has on Keith's wife and teenage daughter.