Weekend

Weekend, which was shot with watery beauty on location in Nottingham in the U.K., also owes something to Before Sunrise, but it's not a gay remake of a straight movie. Its romance is very deliberately not some reworked version of a hetero one.

Sexy, provocative, engrossing and occasionally ornery, it should appeal to anyone whose curiosity about someone new has provoked them to question their own identity.

Cullen and New are British stage actors with little background in film. Haigh's only previous film was a documentary. Perhaps because they don't feel bound by a set of rules, they've created one of the year's most enjoyable surprises.

It's a definitive example of naturalistic moviemaking -- you feel you're breathing the air that the characters are breathing.

Its final moments offer a vision of what a contemporary romance can achieve: an appreciative gasp of truth, a wet-eyed hope for more.

One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.

However, to simply call it 'a gay movie' would commit it a great disservice as the fragmented kaleidoscope of fleeting romantic pains and pleasures should resonate with gay and straight audiences in equal measure.

A romance that finds intimacy in intense conversation but also a very British film about private and public spaces; a potent mix of the sensually intimate and the politically confrontational.

For a movie that bares the souls of its characters so completely, Weekend doesn't unfold like a complicated movie. The dialogue is natural, the sex scenes are tender, and the camera never gets in the way of the story.

Probably one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of gay love, not because it deals with issues of homosexuality, but because it simply tells a tender, honest, emotionally potent love story.

Weekend works beautifully in the moment, and lingers long after an initial viewing. It's certainly an affair to remember.

Weekend has romance to spare, but also takes a look at the cogs turning under the surface of any thoughtful encounter, however brief.