The End of the Affair is one of those old fashioned romantic type British films along the lines of Brief Encounter. Julianne Moore got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but no one in that year was going to beat out Hillary Swank.

Ralph Fiennes has a chance meeting with Julianne Moore and her husband Stephen Rea and the passion gets going almost immediately. The apparently indifferent Rea almost makes the affair too easy for both Fiennes and Moore. Eventually though she breaks it off abruptly with Fiennes and he's obsessed to find out why.

He hires a private detective played by Ian Hart and his report leads to some surprising developments for all concerned.

The film is based on a Graham Greene novel though you can bet that the very Catholic Mr. Greene would not have approved of what Fiennes tells to a Catholic priest played by Jason Isaacs.

Actually I liked the rather droll performance of Ian Hart as the detective who winds up working for two of three sides of the triangle and has no scruples about getting his 10 year old son involved to achieve results. Hart did very good work also in Backbeat, playing a young John Lennon.

This is a remake of a 1955 film that starred Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr though you can bet it was not as graphic as this version is.

For those who love old fashioned romances, you'll like The End of the Affair.

Novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) is writing about a rainy night in 1946 London. He runs into Henry Miles (Stephen Rea) who is married to Maurice's former lover Sarah (Julianne Moore).

Filmmaker Neil Jordan adapts a Graham Greene novel. While it doesn't have the exotic locations, the visuals have the brooding sad romanticism of a rainy London. That's the movie. It's a lot of longing looks, passionate loving, hidden jealousy, and powerfully suppressed emotions. It's not my cup of tea. Also they keep showing the same explosion to the point that I couldn't figure out what's happening. I'm not sure that I like this love triangle. I'm not sure that I care about this love triangle. There is no denying that the three leads are acting the heck out of the love triangle to their best abilities.

When Ralph Fiennes is almost killed by a buzz bomb, lover Julianne Moore promises G*d to give him up if Fiennes is spared. For the rest of the movie, Fiennes' hatred toward G*d grows.

Neil Jordan's remake of the 1955 movie is full of Graham Greene's "tortured Catholic" theology. Visually it is a throwback to those lush British romances of the 1940s, in green-tinged Technicolor; clearly it is meant to replicate the amazing plays of color and shadow of that era, but the process has changed over the decades, and it simply looks foggy; half of the scenes are shot in rain.

The performances, given the leads, Jordan regular Stephen Rea, and Jason Isaacs giving a bang-up Ralph Richardson imitation, are excellent, but Michael Nyman's score is so romantic that the movie occasionally seems to verge on burlesque.