The lesbian love story Carol is adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s semi-autobiographical early novel The Price of Salt and reunites Australia’s Cate Blanchett with Todd Haynes, who directed her Oscar-nominated, cross-dressing performance as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

This time she’s playing a female and the story is more conventional – a carefully controlled period melodrama set in the 1950s, loosely in the same tradition as Haynes’s previous Far From Heaven and the teleseries Mildred Pierce – though Blanchett’s performance is certainly no less commanding.

The events are seen through the eyes of Rooney Mara’s ingénue, Therese, who first encounters Blanchett’s Carol, a married, well-off mother of a young daughter, when she visits the department store where Therese is serving. You sense before Carol even speaks that Blanchett’s performance is going to dominate the film – and indeed it does, helped by a script from Phyllis Nagy that takes her to places that you’re not always expecting. Mara gives excellent support as the inexperienced younger woman.

Carol is the kind of woman who dominates a room by just being inside it, and not only because of her immaculate couture and make-up (the costumes are by revered...