On Swift Horses begins by showing us two images: sex and a deck of cards.

Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is making love to Lee (Will Poulter), a soldier on leave from Korea. Meanwhile, Lee’s brother Julius (Jacob Elordi) has already been discharged from the war and is on his way to meet them both in Kansas, with only his bag and those cards. It’s almost Christmas and Lee wants Muriel to marry him, but she still hasn’t given her answer. Even so, the mood between them is light and fun.  When Julius arrives, for a moment, they are one big happy family in Muriel’s cozy, secluded home, which she inherited from her mother. Spacious, lived-in and lovingly decorated for the holidays, it’s the exact kind of house one could imagine raising a family in. But Lee has dreams of California, and he wants Muriel and Julius out there with him when the war’s over. It’s a dream that sounds too good to be true, but he doesn’t know it yet.

On Swift Horses is the kind of big, sweeping romantic drama that Hollywood just doesn’t make anymore. Director Daniel Minahan — a veteran of the small screen for many years, from Six Feet Under to Fellow Travelers — fills every widescreen shot with gorgeous landscapes and sumptuous colors, fully transporting us to a time when space was abundant and America felt full of possibility.

The film, based on the book of the same name by Shannon Pufahi, is an emotionally complex love triangle that branches out into something even more complex. Muriel marries Lee while pining for Julius — who seems to have much more complicated feelings for her, mixed in with a genuine love for his brother. Over time, both Muriel and Julius find other lovers, while writing each other all the while without Lee’s knowledge. Julius meets Henry (Diego Calva) while working at a casino in Las Vegas, and the two begin a passionate, caustic love affair. Down in the valley, Muriel skips work to fool around with her neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle), a woman living openly as a lesbian despite the stigma. With Henry, Julius finds a man even wilder than him, full of endless ambition. But when it comes to Muriel and Sandra, it’s harder to tell if the feelings are real.

Both Julius and Muriel love to gamble, but while cards are his poison, she prefers betting on horses. Much like their shared vice, their queer love lives are just as dangerous. Even though Muriel comes home every night to her husband, he knows nothing of the life she leads while he’s away. Hiding her gambling money in their home, Muriel tries to maintain her double life without having to take the real risk of being alone. And though she sees Julius as a coward for not coming home to her and Lee, his life of risk is more honest, and over time he begins to confront his own demons.

Elordi gives his best performance yet as Julius, showing his more sensitive, vulnerable side on the big screen for perhaps the first time. His love scenes with Calva are tender and exciting, the men exploring each other’s bodies in a dreamlike motel room. Calva proves his memorable turn in the underrated Babylon two years ago was just a warm-up. He’s got so much more to offer.

In perhaps her meatiest role since Normal People, Edgar-Jones gives an understated performance as Muriel, letting us get to know her through subtle gestures and expressions. Muriel is a woman hiding from her own potential, trying to fit herself into a neat little box, all the while knowing that she can’t breathe once inside. Poulter’s Lee is not cruel enough for us to root against him, but there isn’t much for him to do beyond stand in as a symbol of everything Julius and Muriel want to run away from. A talented comedic actor, Poulter is convincing as the stereotypical ‘50s husband, reaching for his piece of the American dream. And then there’s Calle, who plays Sandra as a woman in the middle — not wanting to fly free or hide, but rather make the world accept her for who she is right out in the open.

On Swift Horses is about the shapes love can take, the varied lives we live and the many different ways one can make a home. It’s beautiful, heartbreaking and demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible. Here’s hoping it brings the romantic epic back into fashion.

Among today’s young acting talents, few possess the enviable combination of depth and charisma shared by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, who play to those considerable strengths as a contemporary British couple who find themselves facing a medical crisis in John Crowley’s deeply introspective We Live in Time.

Handed its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Crowley’s 2019 drama, The Goldfinch, was less enthusiastically received, the film eschews a traditional, linear approach to the subject matter in favor of a looser construction that weaves together a vivid patchwork of timeframes and memories to deeply poignant effect.

For thematic inspiration, Crowley takes his cue from the Lou Reed song “Magic and Loss (The Summation),” and especially the lyrics, “There’s a bit of magic in everything and then some loss to even things out,” in navigating the relationship between passionate, ambitious Almut (Pugh) and sensitive, attentive Tobias (Garfield).

Meeting each other in their 30s as fully-formed individuals with well-defined pasts and a clear sense of their wants and desires, Almut and Tobias proceed to set up house in South London’s verdant Herne Hill. She’s the chef in her own restaurant, and he, still raw from a divorce, is the corporate marketing face of Weetabix cereal.

Despite differing on wanting to raise a family — he’s raring to go, she’s unsure — they eventually end up having daughter Ella (Grace Delaney) after some difficulty getting pregnant, and would seem to be living an idyllic life when Almut receives a devastating diagnosis: a recurrence of ovarian cancer.

Rather than taking a conventional “where do we go from here?” approach, the unique script by playwright Nick Payne is more concerned with “how did we arrive at this place?” The film divides their story into three distinct time periods of varying lengths and re-splices them together in ways more interesting than standard chronological order. The approach allows for a series of lovely/surprising/amusing moments, from Tobias getting the back of his neck tenderly trimmed by his doting dad (Douglas Hodge) to Almut laying in a bathtub, balancing a biscuit on her very pregnant tummy to — in one of the film’s more audaciously choreographed sequences — giving birth in a petrol station loo.

It’s all immersively recorded by cinematographer Stuart Bentley’s photography, which penetratingly captures the defining moments in the couple’s decade-long relationship without ever feeling intrusive. Quite frankly, Bentley wouldn’t have been required to do much more than simply point and shoot, what with the generosity of those gorgeously honest performances given by Crowley’s two highly accomplished leads.

There’s an achingly palpable, playful chemistry between Pugh and Garfield that leaps off the screen. But they also refuse to shy away from letting their characters’ less attractive qualities bleed through. Beneath Tobias’ soulful eyes there’s an undercurrent of passive-aggressiveness that isn’t his best feature. Meanwhile, Almut’s silky-smoky voice can’t gloss over the painful frustration the disease is causing her when she insists on taking part in a prestigious international cooking competition despite her deteriorating condition and her husband’s concerns, protesting, “I don’t want my relationship with Ella to be defined by my decline.”

When that decline ultimately leads to the tragically inescapable and time reverts back to its chronological default, Crowley takes leave with the same tender yet truthful touch that informs the entire production. While We Live in Time and its subject matter might not lay claim to the audience uplift of Crowley’s Oscar-nominated Brooklyn, seldom has such an unflinchingly honest take on mortality felt so transcendently life-affirming.

“The Life of Chuck” is a departure for Mike Flanagan, in the sense that it’s not technically a horror movie. But it is a Stephen King adaptation, which is very much in the “Doctor Sleep” director’s wheelhouse. And it is haunted: By regret, by memories, and by the snuffing out of an entire internal universe when someone dies. (Adding another layer of sorrowful real-life resonance, film journalist Scott Wampler, who died suddenly in May, appears as a background actor in the film, which is dedicated to him.) If anything, “The Life of Chuck” just peels back the layer of metaphor and gets straight to the wistfulness that underpins all ghost stories. 

Structured around a verse from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” — “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes” — “The Life of Chuck” is told in reverse order from the end of a man’s life to the beginning. It does so in a way that’s surprising enough that it’s best not to discuss it in too much detail; suffice to say that it takes a cosmic approach to the idea of inner worlds. (“Every man and every woman is a star,” to quote Whitman’s fellow literary eccentric Aleister Crowley.) The entire movie isn’t sad, although it does land on a note of genuine pathos. But sentimentality suits Flanagan, whose florid writing style is well matched by the high-concept ideas explored here. 

Nick Offerman narrates the opening of each of the film’s three chapters, each of which related in some way to, well, the life of accountant (and surprisingly good dancer) Charles “Chuck” Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston as an adult and Jacob Tremblay as a boy. Flanagan regulars Rahul Kohli and Kate Siegel show up in minor parts, part of a who’s who of familiar genre faces like David Dastmalchian, Matthew Lillard, and Harvey Guillén that rounds out the ensemble cast. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan play slightly bigger roles as a divorced couple who turn to each other for comfort in the imminent apocalypse — to explain more would, again, undermine the film’s most poetic theme — as does Mark Hamill as Albie, Chuck’s New York-accented Jewish accountant grandfather. 

It’s Zeyde Albie who convinces young Chuck that numbers are just as exciting as moonwalking across the school gym, setting him on a stable, but unexciting life path. “The Life of Chuck” uses dancing as a shorthand for whimsy, creativity, playfulness, joy — name an unselfconscious emotion that we’re supposed to put aside in the name of adult responsibility, and it’s expressed through dancing in this movie. Bubbe Sarah (Mia Sara) shows young Chuck musicals to cheer him up after his parents die in a car accident — this dark turn comes on that quickly and brutally in the movie, too — and his fondest memories are of dancing with her in her kitchen as diffuse white light streams in through the window. 

It’s a nice scene, but also a mawkish one. To be fair, Flanagan makes no effort to disguise or apologize for the clichés in “The Life of Chuck,” whose centerpiece scene depicts Chuck rediscovering the magic in his otherwise routine life by dancing with a stranger in the center of a suburban mall promenade as a crowd gathers around them. From there, the movie takes a turn into sadder territory, but the tone remains sunny and sweet and pleasantly generic. The lighting is bright, the locations are quaint, and the quips all come with a pre-packaged air of warmth and wisdom. 

Again, many of the points being made here are of a generic “enjoy every sandwich” type of bent. But there is something touching about “Chuck’s” core premise, which is that even the smallest and most ordinary of lives is animated by a divine spark. A human being is the culmination of every place they’ve ever been, every thing they’ve ever done, and every person they’ve ever met, and each of us carries a galaxy of experiences around with us everywhere we go. And when we die, those worlds die with us. 

Despite his reputation as a master of horror, this side of Mike Flanagan has always been there. (Same for King — he did write “The Green Mile,” after all.) As a filmmaker, Flanagan deals in raw, go-for-broke emotion; it’s just that this time around, he’s using that passion to affirm the audience, not disturb them. Whether one finds this uplifting or eye-rolling is a matter of taste, and cynics will likely find Flanagan’s latest far too saccharine for theirs. Viewers with a sweet tooth, meanwhile, may find themselves thoroughly charmed by “Chuck’s” dorky earnestness. 

Grade: B-

“The Life of Chuck” premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.

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