Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

God's Own Country is a remarkable, profoundly touching film, perhaps the best movie ever made about two men falling in love. That fact is important, but it is not the whole story, it is the real thing, a work of art that that attends to the world it inhabits acutely, every word heard or spoken in it concrete, deeply felt, penetrating, every gesture full of emotion and the wildly, complexly human. I would write about it more fully, but let me settle for just a few instances of what makes it so special. There is a scene in it when Georghe touches, holds, Johnny, so carefully, so slowly and gently, that he is, at heart, bringing him through his fingers and hands into a first experience of love, of what such tactility, such silent tenderness in a deep sense means. I have never seen anything remotely like it in a movie, rarely managed over all these years, despite much trying, to find it any writing: a man being allowed, being brought to feel love through another man by touch alone. How extraordinary the flesh is in this movie, like the wonder of the wool of a dead eviscerated lamb being turned into a coat for a lamb that has no mother, so it might suckle. Gemma Jones. Ian Hart. Step mother, harsh, stroke ridden, difficult father. There is more feeling expressed through their eyes than in the whole of Call Me by Your Name, of most any other recent movie. Simple things, a cup of food held out to be salted by another, a brief touch of a finger to a lover's hand, gesture which the latter than sees he might use with his father, for a finger to skim the skin of his arm as he lies in a hospital bed. And the two lead actors, especially Josh O'Connor as Johnny. There is one moment, among dozens and dozens of others as miraculous, when his father asks him, if the ways of the farm were changed, he would be happy. And Johnny looks up at at him where he sits in his wheel chair overlooking the valley below, stares at his father, as if for the first time seeing with the love he has discovered inside him, around him, from Georghe, carefully looking, his cheeks stretched tight by his jaw, and says, "I think I could.” This is film making of the highest order because it puts into the transient moments of human contact the whole of the best of human possibility, despite the world's being so punishingly harsh over and over. It is the lyricism of stone and mud, of still born calves, of the arduousness of expressing anything one actually feels and wants and can be, where the beauty of the world is bound to its suffering, not just humanity's but all of it, in the muck of it, in the almost ruined self of an almost ruined Johnny finding through another some reason for his being alive at all. And that is what might be called transcendence.