Critics reviews

A lush, lavish period drama that offers one of the most poignant gay love stories ever committed to film, not to mention a respectable dose of (still rare) male nudity.

Built around, naturally, tortured and unrequited love and self-denial, the film nevertheless invests fully in the moments of beauty its leads and its style generate while always binding them to a larger, often architectural, milieu with careful, delicate remove.

How refreshing to watch an Edwardian period drama in which what's queer is not relegated to the subtextual. MAURICE, the 1987 adaptation of E. M. Forster's posthumous novel, is the definitive coming-out blockbuster... It's as stylish and sexy as PRICK UP YOUR EARS or the BBC's Brideshead Revisited, but concise and without the hammer fall or the lifetime of melancholy. It remains one of the few mainstream queer-topic films from that era that doesn't feel dated.

It combines a deeply romantic element – the notion that true love can cut across all conventional social divisions and rules, and form a basis for a permanent way of life – with a much tougher, more documentary account of the loneliness, misery, incomprehension and lack of self-knowledge of Maurice himself, a young suburban stockbroker brought up (as Forster was) by a widowed mother.