Reaching for the Moon - film review

Yearning suffuses Bruno Barreto’s half-excellent Elizabeth Bishop biopic, which hones in on the 10-year affair between the US poet and the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Most of the film is shot in Brazil and Barreto keeps gazing in stodgy awe at the landscape (maybe the Brazilian tourist board had shares in the production).

All the film’s dynamism lies in the script and performances: Miranda Otto’s Elizabeth is a perceptive, self-absorbed boozer; Glória Pires’s Lota is an energetic, elitist bully. They’re a complex and compelling pair and, with a director such as Lisa Cholodenko on board (High Art, The Kids Are All Right), their tragic romance could have lit up the sky.