Rottentomatoes.com gives CMBYN a 96% fresh rating. (The only current film with a higher rating is Paddington 2 with 100%, go figure.)
I was curious, and checked the top critic reviews. Only one was negative. From Canada's Globe and Mail, a reviewer named Kate Taylor.
Read on, if you dare.
(I can't do John's lovely graphics.)
Elevator pitch: Pass the condoms.
Oh to be 17, in love and in Lombardy! Director Luca Guadagnino adapts the André Aciman novel about a precocious Jewish teenager sexually awakening one Italian summer in the 1980s. In his parents’ holiday villa, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) falls for his father’s archeology assistant, the bumptious American grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer), and discovers a love that can just dare to speak its name. The romantic tension is exquisite; the sex is luscious (including that soon-to-be-notorious scene with a peach) but as the al fresco dining, the refreshing swims, the liberal parents and the forgiving girlfriend pile up, the effect becomes precious and the film shifts from languid to long. Chalamet does an excellent job capturing first love and its inevitable heartbreak; Hammer is seductive as Oliver, but laughably implausible as a scholar, especially in a gag-inducing scene where he discourses on the etymology of the word apricot. Perhaps this multilingual, almost-pre-AIDS idyll does not stretch credulity – the family is surely based on Aciman’s own internationalist clan – but it can try the patience. – Kate Taylor
Armie: "bumptious"? "laughably implausible as a scholar"? Kate Taylor can try the patience.