Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)

The American outlier, set among a buttoned-up Kansas City family in the 1930s and 1940s, and proof that the partnership's eye for repression traveled well beyond England. Real-life couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward play the title pair, a lawyer of fixed habits and a wife too polite to want anything. Built from Evan S. Connell's two novels as a string of small, telling episodes rather than a plot, it earned Woodward a Best Actress Oscar nomination and the New York critics' prize. Ideal if you like the restraint but want a change of scenery.