The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/florence-pugh/)
It should require serious ambition to attempt the contemporary romantic drama, a largely exhausted film tradition. This should be doubly true if that drama is nonlinear — why dwell in Oppenheimer’s shadow? While not quite the affective breakthrough the romance film needs, John Crowley’s We Live in Time exercises an assertive edit philosophy and charismatic realism to expose a neglected conceptual intersection of love and time.
As a director, Wilde prioritizes looks over content. You may have seen the film’s trailer, a highlight reel of Stepford Wives visual gags: eggs breaking with nothing inside, Alice wrapping her head in saran, Alice getting pressed to death while cleaning a window. They’re visually satisfying and no doubt creative, but don’t end up being relevant to the plot besides the general messaging that the “separate sphere” ideology is damning. Maybe this would have been groundbreaking during the rise of Second-Wave feminism but at this point has just become shorthand for a very limited view of women’s liberation.