It’s a great relief that Suffragette isn’t a showy, glamorized, romantic period piece meant to wow us with its pretty locales and intricate costume design. The British suffragettes of the early 20th century deserve a more honest, grounded depiction than that, and that’s what director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan deliver. Their version of the suffragette movement is violent, thrilling and dirty. These women put everything on the line in the name of justice and equality, shattering windows and blowing up mailboxes at the risk of losing their jobs and families. Women may have won the right to vote here and in Britain a long time ago, but the tragedy is that many of the injustices the suffragettes rallied against in the past still stand strong today.

We see the movement through the eyes of Maud (Carey Mulligan), a working woman with a husband, Sonny (Ben Wishaw), and a son, George (Adam Michael Dodd). Maud’s not taken from the history books—she’s a composite of Morgan and Gavron’s research on suffragettes of the time, particularly those in the middle class. At the story’s outset she exists outside the suffragette circle, accepting of her lot working at a musty laundry where she’s sexually abused by her boss. Her inner activist is ignited when she sees suffragettes carrying out minor acts of vandalism all around East London in their fight for equal voting rights.

Almost by accident, Maud is recruited by her co-worker Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) and is further inspired by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), a suffragist leader who holds secret meetings in the pharmacy she runs. Leading the larger suffragist charge as figurehead is Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep), who gives Maud a jumpstart of empowerment and inspiration (we see her only briefly, but Streep knows how to make her minutes count). The women may not have a voice in parliament, but they’ve got bravery and conviction to spare.

As she gets caught up in suffragist activities, Maud begins to realize the true scale of her sacrifice for the movement. She’s thrown in jail (where she’s force-fed—a gruesome scene) and villainized by most of her community, and Sonny hasn’t the patience or understanding to tolerate her new life’s mission. He kicks her out of their tiny flat and forbids her from seeing George, leaving her fellow female foot soldiers as her only allies.

Mulligan has a gift that allows her to embody strength and delicateness at the same time, and few roles would be better served by her talents than that of Maud. Heartrending are the scenes in which Maud sneaks George away from school to spend a few precious hours of quality time; you can see joy and anguish in equal parts on Mulligan’s face as Maud savors her time with her son. Also great are Mulligan’s scenes with Brendan Gleeson, who plays a detectie heading up a suffragette surveillance operation. He’s the only almost-sympathetic figure on the oppressor’s side of the story (he empathizes with the suffragettes but ultimately does nothing to help them), though the film never ham-fistedly villainizes the men in the story. Other filmmakers might have made the story about some sort of ethical awakening on the men’s side, but Gavron and Morgan are more tasteful than that; their story is about the women’s fight for justice, period.

There’s no effort to show off the film’s elaborate production design in a Hollywood-y way by Gavron, and that’s one of the film’s strengths. Every bit of East London we see looks detailed and painstakingly designed, but the characters are always the focus, which results in a more immersive period experience. This is the first movie ever to be allowed to film at the UK’s Houses of Parliament, and the filmmakers don’t squandor the opportunity by giving the location center stage. It’s the sign of a film made with dignity and care.

The thing working against Suffragette is that it’s not quite as rousing as you’d think it would be. It’s admirable in the way it respects the dark days these heroes endured to pave the way for future generations, but there’s something about the tone and pace of the movie that lacks an overarching sense of force and activist aggression, something a movie so unenamored with style could have done better with. On the other hand, I’ll take a melancholic but respectful historical drama over a glitzy, Oscar-bait-y one any day.

Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, takes a sobering look at gender inequality through the eyes of the trailblazing suffragettes of early-20th-century Britain. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a fictional composite of several women and experiences of the time. A working woman, wife and mother, Maud gets swept up by the suffragette movement, changing her life forever as she becomes a militant activist for women’s rights. Evading the authorities in their fight for equality, the suffragettes’ crusade puts a strain on their home lives, with the future of Maud’s family hanging in the balance as she’s scorned by her disapproving husband.

In a roundtable interview we spoke to Gavron and Morgan about Suffragette, which also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Grace Stottor, Romola Garai, Meryl Streep, Ben Wishaw, and Brendan Gleeson. The film opens today in select cities and expands wide on November 20th.

What inspired the project?
Sarah: It was a long genesis for me. I wanted to do it for about ten years. I grew up with a mother who became a local politician. I watched her agency in a very male world. We haven’t learned about suffragettes in school. We just knew the very sanitized Mary Poppins version like everybody did. It’s not a widely known story. There was a really good TV series called Shoulder To Shoulder that made an impact. So, people were discussing it, but there wasn’t a big screen version of it. It seemed extraordinary and such a timely story, overdue in terms of telling the story. But also, it seemed to resonate with the world we live in in so many ways. The two producers, Faye Ward and Alison Owen—it occurred to them at the same time. They had a conversation about doing a film about this, and it made sense for us to talk to Abi because she was the writer who had worked on Brick Lane.

Abi: From my point of view it was very exciting because I had done biopics before, but this felt like a different way of looking at a biopic. We started to focus in and think, “Okay, we could do ‘The Extraordinary Life of Miss Pankhurst’ or Emily Wilding Davison.” But those women will have at one point have a film about their lives. I hope they do. But when we started to hone in on the lives of the working women, there were surprising details everywhere we looked. The police surveillance records, which were only opened in 2003, where you’d see a tiny bit of an interview. Or you would read a testimonial of a woman who had been taken when she took the deputations to the House of Parliament. These women are really interesting because the jeopardy on their lives is so profound. So many of these women were being appallingly treated at work. Their working conditions were just chronic. They tried to manage having working lives and children and they didn’t have a wealthy husband or family wealth. They were fighting for equal pay and dealing with sexual violence. There were so many issues they were dealing with, and they were so profound and so 21st-century.

I started to think, what if we took a woman who was outside of that, in a place of passivity, who didn’t realize just how downtrodden and difficult her life was. And then, through engagement with the movement, moves towards militant activism and change, realizing it’s the ordinary women who change history. Then we though, that might be a story for us all. I think that was when we started to feel like it could be a proper movie.

Talk about Maud. She’s a composite of many women.
Abi: Originally, she was a character I put in the house of Alice Houghton, played by Romola Garai. I had this idea that the lady upstairs was going to fall in love with the maid. Through that, they would emancipate each other. But when I started doing more research and we started looking at the world of the laundries in East London, you started to look at the extraordinary working conditions and the ailments and the injuries these women had. There seemed to be a contradiction from the photos you would see of these laundries, which actually looked quite clean and civilized. It’s like, okay, this is interesting. Then, within that, you realize some of the women in these places joined the movement. When they were in incarceration, they couldn’t pay their bail. They lost their jobs and sometimes their children. That story started to have a real sense of jeopardy.

Sarah: Maud was drawn from these working women. Many of them didn’t write their own stories, but there were some who wrote their own stories, or other people wrote their stories, or you could piece together their lives from police records. Hannah Mitchell was a working woman, Annie Barnes, Annie Kenney—you could find Mauds in the research. It was about being liberated from the biopic.

Abi: It allowed us to kind of create this ensemble of women, so you could find the Edith Ellyns who had perhaps been educated, but at that time weren’t able to pick up their degrees. [They would] marry into relationships where they were really the brains of the relationship and would have entitlement to a business. Someone like Violet had a very abusive relationship, which you couldn’t talk about. It might be talked about when noticing someone’s bruises, but there was no refuge, nowhere for these women to go. I worked on an adaptation of Nelly Ternan’s life, who was the lover of Charles Dickens. I’d already looked at Victorian East London 40-50 years earlier, and to look back at 1912 and realize that so many of these issues that Charles Dickens was drawing upon are still affecting women today, I thought, this is interesting.

How important was it that the protagonist be the total package—be married, be a mother, be someone who has essentially accepted her lot in life and only gradually begins to see that it doesn’t have to be her lot in life?
Abi: I think those are the strains that feel very familiar to us all. I was trying to create a character who was identifiable. I don’t think you have to be a woman who is married. The film is about empowering women to say, globally, there are these huge inequalities we deal with. For Maud, we wanted to create a woman who was not even yet engaged with how unhappy she was. This is a woman who’s been institutionalized from an early age. She’s been abused by her employer, her mother was most likely abused before her. Maud has a scar on her arm, and the idea was that she was there when her mother was burned to death at the laundry. You’re meant to realize this woman has a huge legacy that she has just suppressed and suppressed. Engagement with a group of women who say, “We’re equal. You no longer have to deal with these conditions. Your life can change,” that’s the thing that activates her. It was very important that we created all of those pressures women of today have. They have to bring in money, raise their children, deal with sexual violence or sexual intimidation. They have to find their voice, and the whole point of the film is trying to give these voiceless women a voice.

Sarah: By looking at a marriage at the center of it, we were able to explore the politics of the marriage in terms of the power balance and the parental rights issue and the lack of economic power within a marriage.

It also raises the stakes so much higher.
Abi: Absolutely. And that’s a good point. The film couldn’t just work [politically]. It had to work as a piece of genuine human drama. We were trying to consecrate that jeopardy. That’s something Sarah worked really hard on.

Brendan Gleeson’s character is interesting. I think his conversations with Maud are important.
Sarah: The police archives opened up in 2003 and revealed this undercover surveillance observation, which was so extraordinary because it showed the level of threat the government perceived these women posed. They took this cutting-edge technology to the streets, and it all seemed so intriguing. There are these two Irish policemen we honed in on, and Abi drew on them for Brendan Gleeson’s character. What was exciting was that he was a character who wasn’t single-faceted. He changed and had many dimensions. He was upholding the law, but the very act of surveying those women meant that he was seeing them up-close and understanding their dilemma, actually.

Abi: In fact, that was what was so great about working on this film together. It was actually Sarah who found those two detectives. That’s amazing. We’d be working on a police officer and he wouldn’t feel fully rounded, so Sarah would go and research. I’d written it as an Irish character, but when Brendan came onboard it really made sense. He had his own history he was bringing to the table. So many of the techniques used on these women went on to be used in Northern Ireland. There were so many layers to that journey of making him, and it really is about the fusion of a great actor who brings his own baggage to the table and a director who’s constantly going, “Let’s shape, let’s shape, let’s shape.”

When I was watching the movie I thought about the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
Abi: It was more about the metaphor. These women wash and clean and restore and get rid of the dirt and stains of London, starching men’s collars. They send them out clean again only for them to come back dirty. It was this relentless cycle these women were in, always trying to maintain order, and yet there was this underlying chaos. You’re always looking for a visual metaphor to somehow have a relationship with the themes of the film. I think the laundry was really important.

The costumes and locations are extraordinary, but the film doesn’t seem concerned with showing them off like other period movies are.
Sarah: We did want to embed it in the period and make it feel very real. We chose a lot of real locations and didn’t do set builds whenever possible. We closed off a central London street for that opening sequence where they smash windows in Central London. We got access to the House of Parliament, which was exciting because it was a place no film crew was ever allowed to film in. We petitioned like suffragettes and they agreed. [laughs] Just to be in that place where history had happened felt like a marker of how far we had come. But also, as you say, we didn’t want to make the locations a character or foreground them. We wanted you to follow the characters through their world, glimpsing life as they did. We created a 360 degree world so we could capture their actions instead of staging it.

What kind of homework did you give the cast?
Sarah: They’d never had so much homework in their lives! [laughs] We gave them these packets. We got the whole team assembled for weeks and were feeding them stuff from the minute they committed. We fed them books and background and took them to laundries and police cells—whatever we could do to really bring the world to life for them. We created these research packages for each aspect of [the story], and that was great. We had Carey on for months and had a three-week rehearsal period.

Abi: What’s great is that the Olive Schreiner quote we used at the end of the movie is from her book Dreams In A Desert, and the book became very important to Carey. There were a few scenes we had to end the movie, and we suddenly realized we needed something that truly symbolized the fact that the fight goes on and that it’ll be the next generation they’ll pass it on to. She found that quote. We wrote a scene where Emily Wilding Davison gives her the book. That’s what was great—she could really go in and participate in that way.

It feels like it’s the right time for this film to come out.
Sarah: We hope so. When we were developing it, it strangely felt like it was becoming more timely, or at least the world was becoming more receptive to these themes and ideas. Abi honed in on this period that felt particularly resonant, so there was there was the police surveillance operation, which echoed all the issues around surveillance. Violence and protest and this journey towards activism, custodial rights, sexual violence. We were also hearing from more women around the world, probably because the digital world was allowing those women to be heard. It seemed the time to tell it. Feminism has also suddenly become less of a dirty word. Hopefully not a dirty word. [laughs]

The Invisible Woman, Ralph Fiennes sophomore directorial effort (following up 2011’s Coriolanus), tells the true story of the love affair Charles Dickens (played by Fiennes) had with a much younger woman, actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), with a touch so delicate and soft it fails to leave a lasting impression. Though exquisitely designed and speckled with a handful of moments that are truly inspired, the central romance feels too cold-to-the-touch and blasé to deserve such a grand production.

The film opens years after Dickens’ death, with an older Nelly, now married, watching her teacher husband’s students rehearsing their production of “The Frozen Deep”, one of Dickens’ plays. Through the use of thinly-veiled expositional dialog, we learn that everyone with knowledge of her relationship with the author is under the impression that is was a platonic one (Dickens took the secret of their affair to the grave). We then flash back to the time to the beginning of their relationship to learn its true nature as we rifle through Nelly’s memories.

Charismatic, gregarious, and glamorous, Fiennes’ turn as Dickens is captivating. Following a theatrical performance, Dickens–45 years old and at this point an eminently beloved literary celebrity–meets an 18-year-old Nelly, her three sisters, and their mother Frances (Kristen Scott Thomas), all actresses. Of the sisters, Dickens feels a gravitation toward Nelly, whose meekness combined with the intimidation of Dickens’ advanced age and stature makes her weak in the knees. Frances, though not thrilled at the thought of the relationship, sees it as an opportunity for she and her girls to ride in more advantageous social circles.

Dickens is married to a heavy-set, regular-looking woman named Catherine (Joanna Scanlan), mother to his ten children. Now, you’re probably thinking, “I know what comes next! The big-headed Dickens, unfulfilled and suffocated by his marriage and home life, casts his ordinary wife aside in exchange for the young, beautiful mistress, resulting in a mountain of heartbreak and high drama!”

You’d be right, save for that last part about the heartbreak and high drama. Dickens does cast Catherine aside via a letter to the editor of the Times in which he announces their separation, and he does steal away with the beautiful Nelly. What’s strange and confusing is how everyone involved in the awful ordeal treats it like it’s a completely acceptable, no-big-deal “arrangement”. Everyone acts so apathetic and proper in their reaction to the affair that we as the audience can’t help but react apathetically as well.

The big surprise of the film is Scanlan, who has a couple terrific moments fueled by raw human emotion, each a welcome jolt that saves us from the sauntering, lifeless slog that is the rest of the film. Her reaction to the aforementioned Times letter is crushing, and a quiet conversation she shares with Nelly, in which she clears the air with utmost class and dignity, is unforgettable.

Fiennes does a good job as well, and Dickens’ work absolutely drips of his tongue as he recites it. It’s his scenes with Jones that leave a lot to be desired. There’s no clear indication or demonstration of why he loves this girl so much he’d leave his family behind for her. This is a crucial error, as this relationship is the prime focus of the film. And yet, on screen we feel nothing from them in the form of passion, longing, or chemistry. This is an empty romance, which consequently makes the film as a whole feel emotionally anemic.

The Period costume and set design is marvelous, with Fiennes doing a good job of capturing the finer details with his camera. In fact, I constantly found myself taking momentary vacations from the story to admire the elaborate furnishings, because whatever British ho-humming the characters on screen were doing was losing its grip on me.

Steve McQueen’s Shame is a mesmerizing film about a man that has a severe addiction to sex who finds it impossible to have emotions around others. The film is dark and depressing with shame present in each of the characters eyes. But the true shame here is that the film will not be seen by most because of the NC-17 rating it received, a true shame.

The film starts off in a New York subway when Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) notices a woman on the train giving him flirty looks. A dramatic score builds up as she gets off the train at its next stop. We see a wedding ring on her finger but that does next stop him from chasing after her. He frantically looks all around the stop but she is nowhere in sight. In his mind, she was the one that “got away”.

At a glance Brandon seems to have everything going for him. He is a charming, handsome, and successful man. What you do not see the strong addiction he has to sex. He does not believe in marriage because he is incapable of emotionally connecting to people. The longest relationship he has ever had is four months and it was probably his longest by a landslide.

On any given night he brings a lady home from a bar, hires a prostitute or settles for internet pornography. He often watches pornography on his computer without pleasuring himself. It has gotten so bad that his work computer stopped working because of the amount of pornography and subsequently computer viruses that were on it.

He comes home one night to find music blaring in his apartment. Thinking he has walked in on some kind of criminal he quickly heads to the closest to get a bat. Then he bursts open the bathroom door only to find it is his sister, Sissy Sullivan (Carey Mulligan).

It would be just like Sissy to show up uninvited as that is the whimsical nature of her personality. She is a beautiful traveling singer but she is also not without her flaws. The first indication that she is suicidal is when she and Brandon are at the subway and she half-jokingly acts if she is going to step down to the tracks. Perhaps it was more of a reaction than a joke? The second time her suicidal tendencies comes up is at the dinner table when someone spots marks on her arms that she simply shrugs off by saying she was bored as a child.

Sissy just wants to stay in contact with her brother. She knows if she stops attempting to do so with him that she would never hear from him again. But he does not see it like that. Brandon looks at her as weight on his shoulders and a responsibility. She stands in his way of living the life he wishes to pursue.

Hinted along the way is the fact that their upbringing was rough, but it was never explained. It is not a bad thing that it was never explained as films often give out unnecessary details. Instead you will be thinking to yourself just exactly what it was that their parents did to thems growing up.

Michael Fassbender was simply stunning in his bravest and greatest performance to date. I agree with the many out there that say he was snubbed from an Oscar nomination, but it is not much of a mystery as to why. It had less to do with his performance in the film as it did with the rating of the film.

It is hard to believe that this marks only the second film that which Steve McQueen has directed. Shame was executed so well you think he would have been doing this his whole life. I have foolishly not seen his first film, Hunger, but after watching this one I will be sure to add it to my list.

The cinematography was very well done. In particular the scene where he is jogging down several blocks in downtown New York City. Shots of the city skyline are frequent throughout the film and a character in the film even says at one point, “Wow. I forget how beautiful this city is.” The colors in Shame are dark which works perfectly for its subject matter.

Ultimately, Shame is about the failure to connect emotionally with people. It is a passionate, perverse, and powerful film. But I suspect Steve McQueen knew this already. In the last scene of Shame the words powerful, thoughtful, and relevant appear clearly visible in the background. I do not think that was an accident.