A great example of frank, emotionally honest filmmaking with three totally vulnerable lead performances, Passages takes a subject that can so easily be reduced into clichés—infidelity—and approaches it with a genuine sense of melancholy. It can still be frustrating to watch fully developed adults refuse to communicate more clearly about their feelings, but director and co-writer Ira Sachs also understands the nuanced gender dynamic that informs some of these bad decisions. Tomas understands that his commitment to Martin may not give him the "easy" satisfaction of a traditional romance, but there is also a sense that his attraction to Agathe (supposedly the first time he's truly fallen for a woman) might be more of an impulsive attempt to settle for something safer, something that he has more control over.

Ben Whishaw is reliably sympathetic as Martin, and Adèle Exarchopoulos carries herself with the unembellished authenticity that many of the best French actors do. And Franz Rogowski makes Tomas both entirely pathetic and still so very heartbreaking in the predicament he's put himself into. There are no cheap histrionics or outbursts of emotion here—just performers living fully within each moment and selling us on the situation they're in.

With all the discourse that continues to rage on about the necessity of sex scenes in movies, Passages makes for a terrific case of a film that knows exactly what kind of emotions to convey through this most intimate act between two people. Whether they're between Tomas and Agathe or Tomas and Martin, these scenes are raw and beautiful without being emptily exploitative, and it really does feel like the characters are expressing very complex things to each other that wouldn't have been communicated with as much passion (or realism, for that matter) if they simply talked things out. Passages believes that sex is perfectly natural part of the human experience, and is therefore just as worthy of being represented on screen.