I've been a stranger to filmmaker Todd Haynes' past work but his love for biographies has not been strange to me. Carol is a film of exquisite subtlety and longing, a work that does not so much announce its emotions as allow them to slowly bloom in the hearts of its characters—and its audience. Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, it is a story of forbidden love in 1950s America, told with an observer’s eye and a poet’s soul.