Mixed-race childhood friends reunite in middle class adulthood and become increasingly involved in each other's lives and insecurities. While Irene identifies as African-American and is married to a Black doctor, Clare "passes" as white and has married a prejudiced, wealthy white man.... (Full plot summary below)
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Mixed-race childhood friends reunite in middle class adulthood and become increasingly involved in each other's lives and insecurities. While Irene identifies as African-American and is married to a Black doctor, Clare "passes" as white and has married a prejudiced, wealthy white man.
Leave your thoughts about Passing.
| Time OutDave CalhounThe story passes from summer to winter, seasonally and tonally, and Hall’s chief allies in bringing her smart script to screen are Edu Grau’s stunning black-and-white photography (reason alone to see the film), Dev Hynes’s piano jazz score and two extraordinarily thoughtful central performances from Negga and Thompson. |
| The TelegraphTim RobeyAlive to pulse-quickening details of body language and the conversational codes by which a dangerous friendship lives or dies, the film is a study in contrasts far beyond the monochromatic. |
| San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleIt’s a sophisticated piece of work, slightly haunted, with an underlying sorrow that can’t be resolved or remedied. |
| Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsA lesser director, working in a clunky-realism vein with less skilled designers and especially performers, might’ve turned Passing into a conventional something or other. In novel form, and in Hall’s beautiful adaptation, it is anything but conventional. |
| The New York TimesManohla DargisTogether with Thompson and Negga, Hall hauntingly brings to life characters forced to exist in that “not entirely friendly” space, with its cruelties, appearances, ambiguities and hard, merciless truths. |
| VarietyJessica KiangThis radically intimate exploration of the desperately fraught concept of “passing” — being Black but pretending to be white — ought to be too ambitious for a first-time filmmaker, but Hall’s touch is unerring, deceptively delicate, quiet and immaculate, like that final fall of snow. |
| The AtlanticShirley LiHall seems to have grasped the story as a performer would, prioritizing the potency of the characters’ interior lives over the plot. And perhaps given her acting background, she draws from Thompson and Negga a pair of finely tuned and exquisite performances. In every scene they share, they radiate a tender but perilous chemistry. |
| Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonIt might have taken one actress to make a movie so reliant on others. It certainly took a director with a supreme confidence, not just in the talents of her performers but in the power of gesture. |
| ReelViewsJames BerardinelliThe movie has a magnetic quality that’s all the more welcome because of all the weighty issues forming its foundation. It’s a tremendous debut effort for Hall, whose work seems more like that of a seasoned veteran than a first-timer. |
| Vanity FairCassie da CostaMuch of what you see in Passing you’ll miss if you don’t really pay attention. This is, obviously, the entire idea. No matter the language we use or the identities we are assigned or take on, race is not material or fixed—it transforms and distorts. |
