The great and singular 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson requires a one-of-a-kind filmmaker to tell the story of her life, and in Terence Davies she has found a soulmate. The director of Distant Voices, Still Lives, The House of Mirth and The Deep Blue Sea follows the poet from her rebellious college days when she rejected the Protestant pieties of her day, to her increasingly reclusive life in the bosom of her family in Amherst, to her painful death. As Dickinson, Cynthia Nixon gives a career-defining performance that captures the acerbic wit, ferocious independence and increasing bitterness of a woman whose genius went unrecognized in her lifetime.

Unfolding in beautiful tableau-like compositions, with epigrammatic dialogue that makes no pretense of naturalism, A Quiet Passion is a film of both scathing social satire and tragic grandeur.

“Davies has been, for thirty years, among the world’s best filmmakers… A Quiet Passion will take its place as one of his finest creations, as one of the great movies of the time. I’m thrilled to say that it’s an absolute, drop-dead masterwork.”  Richard Brody, The New Yorker