Continuing their winning formula of E.M. Forster adaptations, Maurice held personal resonance for director-producer team James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, whose life partnership was both professional and romantic. While studying at Cambridge, Maurice (James Wilby) finds a companion in the rich and charming Clive Durham (Hugh Grant). Clive reveals he has feelings much deeper than friendship and Maurice realises he has been denying his own desires— but the fear of criminal and social consequences to their love threatens to drive them apart. This atmospheric ode to young love and loss is Merchant-Ivory at their most swooning and subtle, touching on themes that Ivory would finally win the elusive Oscar for co-writing Call Me By Your Name.

Drawing from his own university experiences, E.M. Forster wrote Maurice in roughly 1914, but contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality discouraged him from sharing it beyond his close friends; it was eventually published in 1971 after his death. It's a meticulous period film as lush and beautiful as audiences had come to expect from Merchant-Ivory, but beneath the genteel surface of the languorous Cambridge summer lies the quietly radical notion of depicting an unabashed gay love story at the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis, held together by sensitive and committed performances.