review for A Room With a View on AllMovie

Though they had been making films together for over two decades, director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant didn't reach widespread popular or critical success until 1986's A Room With a View. Adapted by their frequent collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from one of E.M. Forster's lighter novels, the movie is a perfectly weighted, gorgeously staged comedy of manners. In her second film, Helena Bonham Carter made quite an impression as Lucy, and she spent much of the decade typecast in stuffy period-piece roles. Daniel Day Lewis provides spot-on work as the uptight, priggish suitor Cecil, a marked contrast to his almost polar-opposite role in Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette, which marked him as a new actor of unusual versatility. He would become a sex symbol two years later in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Room was nominated for eight Academy Awards and brought home three, including one for Jhabvala's adaptation.