Carol

A shop girl and a wealthy woman going through a divorce meet across a department store counter and drive west together. Todd Haynes adapts Patricia Highsmith’s novel — the one she published under a pseudonym because it let its lesbians have a future — with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara doing an extraordinary amount of work through glass, gloves and mirrors.

Everything is displaced into texture and framing because nothing could be said out loud in 1952, which makes the few moments of directness land like a slap. The final shot across a restaurant is one of the great endings.