Critics reviews

A film for lovers of trains and Lean; for people who think Anna Karenina was a touch dramatic; for devourers of buns and drinkers of milky tea.

As enacted through fears about one's life choices, [the film] casts Laura's sense of doubt as a political problem, where a woman meddling in matters outside of the home allows the darker side of her being to rear its ugly head. At least, that's how her behavior could have been characterized in the past, where familial roles appeared to have stable meaning. That's what seems to fascinate Lean: the sense of Laura's predicament having a wholly different significance in just a seven-year timespan.

The experience of involuntarily embracing someone who threatens to destroy your life has never been more exquisitely realized, in all its glory and misery... Lean hadn't yet graduated to the epics for which he's now famous, and he shoots most of Brief Encounter as simply and cleanly as possible, which lends uncommon force to his very occasional formal flourishes—most notably, a disorienting tilt of the camera that visually represents one character's momentary descent into suicidal madness.

Brief Encounter is a majestic locomotive that steams deservedly among the immortals of cinema. For as long as people yearn for the incompatible goals of stable monogamy and spontaneous romance, David Lean's black-and-white masterpiece will be as vital as tracks to the trains that roar across them.

Brief Encounter is a beautiful film to watch. Shot by Robert Krasker (who would photograph Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and Visconti's Senso (1954) – two other gorgeous looking movies), the images only add to the dream state of the characters. For Laura, this is exactly what's it's like – a dream, a fantasy. But can it be real, can she ever really leave her husband, or is this love only to be a fleeting one? Will she eventually just wake up? Either way, it's extraordinarily romantic.

[The] frustration is intensely felt (if slightly enervating in its second act, which can only repeat itself), but Brief Encounter is most compactly understood as a monument to romance as antisocial pact, an appeal both specific to its time and place and one with universal lure.

David Lean's classic weepie, adapted from a Noël Coward play (Still Life), is sheer perfection—the gold standard of tragic romances whose influence can still be seen to this day.

Brief Encounter was a tremendously original film when it was released, its ironic contrasts and low-key, realistic approach to screen romance vibrant, and its careful use of a specific piece of preexisting music—Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2—laid groundwork for the kind of integrated use of such music which many a later film indulge in plenty. It is a near-perfect film, only blemished b some of screenwriter Noel Coward's too-noble-for-belief-dialogue in occasions.

To say that BRIEF ENCOUNTER is one of the finest films ever made on the subject of love, destiny, self-denial, and melancholy would be absurdly reductivist. But true.

Seen today, Brief Encounter is perhaps, quite literally, a dream of England long ago. And if aspects of it have entered the mythology and cliché of the British cinema, more than enough remains in this complex film to move and fascinate us still.

Though based on a short play (and screenplay) by Noel Coward that rarely rises above the level of the old women's magazines, this 1945 tale... does manage to zero in on some of the more depressing aspects of English middle-class life, and thus survives more as a social document than a genuinely compelling drama.

The most poignant movie in recent months is a bleak, inactive item called "Brief Encounter," which deals sensitively and decorously with the extra-marital transgression of two solidly married people... It is highly unorthodox for movies to handle colorless people and almost unheard of to leave their lives ungilded, yet it is this very naturalism that makes "Brief Encounter" a haunting work.