Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

What is the right thing to do? Follow your fantasy mate while destroying one who loves you, or staying behind and sacrificing yourself so that the one who loves you will stay alive? Many people have had to make such a choice: the person of your dreams appears, and there is a real possibility that you can establish a relationship with that person. However, you've established a relationship with another, an uneven relationship, where he loves you more than you love him. But he is a good person, and devoted. Handsome, a good lover. But the person of your dreams (in this case, Joseph Lees) is also real, and could take you to a place where your life can be miraculous and sublime. What to do?I enjoyed this film tremendously, and easily related to the characters and situations.

Film-making is all about Waiting they say. So is Love. This film epitomizes the seemingly unending Wait for the Right Man - that one man who signifies all that is beautiful and pure and noble of mind and body - someone worth living and fighting for. For Eva this Wait has even more poignance because she knows who that man is...that he's not just a figment of her imagination, but a living breathing man named Joseph Lees - someone whom she knows can broaden the horizons of her restricted world and love her for who she is and not for what he derives from her(which is how Harry loves her).The case against Harry is not predetermined. It is established gradually. There are some touching moments between Eva and him when he's actually likeable. The scene in which he takes Eva out of the crowded boxing room is one such incident. Harry is at once boyish and likeable and selfish and despicable. Lee Ross has brought out these shades in his character brilliantly. As much as it is Eva's story, it is also the story of Joseph Lees. And it is Rupert Graves, in the title role, who makes this film for what it is. He is a Dream(don't mean to pun!) in the film! I had only seen him in Louis Malle's 'Damage' which he did 7 years before 'Dreaming...', a film in which he looked much younger, though he was completely overshadowed by the oh-so-powerful Jeremy Irons who played his father. For the audience to feel any empathy whatsoever for Eva for dreaming of Joseph Lees for so long, the actor had to be someone for whom the audience would feel the same. And Rupert Graves is absolutely divine in the role! It is because of him that the audience too gets involved in Eva's quest for Joseph Lees. In any film of this sort, deriving empathy for the characters is everything. It is to the credit of Eric Styles, the director that he has managed that. From the beginning you know that these two people, Eva and Joseph *have to* be together. You laud Janie, Eva's little sister(wonderfully played by Lauren Richardson) in her efforts to bring them together. You frown at Eva's father who unknowingly acts as an obstacle between them. Samantha Morton is excellent as Eva. It must be tough to act in a film where you have to cry so much and make it look real. She manages that. Her convulsive fit of tears in the end just before she rejoins Joseph is very well rendered by Morton. She has rendered the character with due grace and sensitivity. Cinematography and music are two of the other wonders of this film. The former has added to the atmospheric quality of the film, capturing well the wild undulating beauty of the Isle of Man where the film was shot. The music has added beautiful lyrical cadences to the emotions in the film. Not surprisingly it is composed by a master-composer like Zbigniew Preisner whose music for Kieslowski's 'Blue' and other films is equally beautiful. Worth dreaming....!!

"Dreaming of Jospeh Lees", a good, earnest and artful shoot, tells of the coming of age of a rural English girl and her conflict over a tentative romance with a close friend while yearning for a less available kissin' cousin for whom she's carried a torch since childhood. Over all a good film, this story lacks substance, spends its time poorly, toys with the audience in a fraudulent attempt to whet interest in the absence of a solid story, and is too far out of the mainstream to be popular. Nonetheless, for those patient few who can buy into the characters, "Dreaming..." will be a very satisfying watch.

i rented dreaming of joseph lees as a fan of rupert graves. i was not disappointed. samantha morton portrays eva as fragile, passionate, and naive, pining after her cousin joseph while living with the local pig farmer harry. harry's dependency and mental illness is disturbing and vaguely unexplainable; however, graves steals the film, sympathetically and realistically playing the mysterious joseph lees, carrying his own burden of a terrible accident in which is lost his leg. the ending is powerful and worth wading through the last half hour of harry's violent, pointless insanity and eva's maddening indecision.