Philip Kaufman’s “Henry and June,” a film about the relationship between Henry Miller and Anais Nin (and Miller’s wife, June) is decidedly not about a striving male writer and a passive female muse. 

 

It’s also probably the sexiest writer movie ever-certainly sexier than anything either of these literary smut-peddlers ever penned. Maria De Madeiros is pitch perfect as the liberated and adventurous Nin. 

 

Fred Ward was equally born to play Miller. And Kaufman’s fantasia, excerpted from Nin’s diaries, beautifully illuminates how lived experience feeds artistic imagination.