Gillian Armstrong's 'Little Women'

There are certain films that set off very pleasurable vibrations in me as I watch them. It's some mood, some texture in the film that surrounds me, captivates me. I get sent off into a hypnotic reverie, but it's a reverie not far from the film but close to it, very fixed on its details: not so much the plot details, but the faces, the colours, the movements, the poetic words that the characters speak, the small shifts in their emotions. If the film is good, if it sustains its mood and doesn't throw me any sudden clangers, I can stay in this state for the entire running time. Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) affected me in this way enormously – I felt that I had dreamt the film by the time I got home from the screening. So did Emir Kusturica's magical Arizona Dream (1993). And Gillian Armstrong's utterly enchanting Little Women (1994) gets to me this way too.