Opening today in limited release, Cairo Time is earning some glowing notices for Patricia Clarkson.
Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: Ms. Clarkson’s performance as Juliette, the fashion-writer wife of a United Nations functionary, is the film’s reason for being. She makes yearning palpable. She turns mysterious silences into a language of love.
Watching her in “Cairo Time,” I thought back to “Summertime,” the 1955 David Lean melodrama with Katharine Hepburn as another middle-age American tourist, a lonely spinster hoping wistfully, and fearfully, to find romance in Venice. Faithful to the genre, as well as the period, Ms. Hepburn played her role with unconcealed and affecting passion. Ms. Clarkson takes a different approach. Instead of emphasizing Juliette’s loneliness, she conceals it as best she can. Instead of acknowledging her character’s ardent desire for love and intimacy, she withholds it like a top-secret, eyes-only text. In a candidly retro romance, hers is a quintessentially modern performance, minimalist in style and maximalist in impact.