Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Brick was once a football star, but the death of his closest friend ended his career and sent him spiraling into alcohol. His wife, Maggie, tries to coax him out of his despair and back toward life. When the family gathers around Brick’s ailing father—a formidable Southern patriarch with a heavy frame and an even heavier tongue—old wounds split open and buried tensions catch fire. This adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play may retain a cautious ambiguity around Brick’s relationship with his late friend, but its emotional force remains undiminished. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman are magnificent, breathing longing, anger, and vulnerability into Williams’s dialogue and giving the film its fierce, aching power.