WHILE WE WERE HERE

In this tightly crafted relationship drama, Jane (Kate Bosworth) and her husband Leonard (Iddo Goldberg) travel to Naples—where Leonard is playing viola with the local orchestra—hoping to reinvigorate their silently disintegrating marriage and escape a personal tragedy that hangs heavily between them. Jane, left alone most days, wanders the streets listening to tapes she made of interviews with her grandmother, seeking inspiration to finish a book based on the old recordings. Facing writer's block, she takes a day trip to stunning Ischia, where she meets Caleb (Jamie Blackley), a young American leading a hermetic yet Dionysian life on the island. As the two embark on an unlikely emotional affair, Jane's carefully constructed world begins to crack open and she faces drastic changes in her life.

Writer/director Kat Coiro draws out brilliant performances from her cast: The tension between Bosworth and Goldberg smacks of an all-too-common reality and Blackley's carefree romanticism is a pitch-perfect antidote. Although it's a thoroughly modern film, the black-and-white imagery (an homage to the greats of Italian cinema) evokes reveries from another era and imbues the film with a rich sense of both nostalgia and honesty.