Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years is a two-hander about aging that refuses to walk the generally prescribed paths of shedding sentiment and/or dwelling on disease, and for that alone, it deserves hardy praise. On the eve of a couple’s 45th anniversary, news arrives of the discovery of a body found …
The period of the Second World War, with its consequent boost to the spirit of The Show Must Go On, recalls Truffaut's The Last Metro and (an even closer contemporary) the remake of To Be or Not To Be. But lacking the specificness of either of those, this one, about …
Second World War espionage thriller, set on the British homefront at Bletchley Park, otherwise known as Station X, the top-secret cryptography center, where they've now got just four days to crack "Shark," the revised German U-boat code, before a convoy of merchant ships from the U.S. enters perilous waters. In …
An elegy on an entire generation -- the one that came of age during the Second World War -- but narrowly focussed on four East London drinking buddies, and most particularly on the two whose friendship dates to the North African theater of the war. The title, from the Booker …
True story, crime story, sob story, about an epileptic halfwit (mentally damaged in the Blitz?) who falls in with a bad crowd, takes part in the murder of a London bobby. (When he yelled "Let him have it," he meant "Give the copper the gun," not "Plug him with it.") …
Worth seeing if for nothing more than the opening credits, unspooled in front of a Victorian toy theater of the type that Stevenson memorialized in his essay, "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured." Each of the principal players is represented by a look-alike paper cutout, and the behind-the-scenes collaborators are …
Good acting has seldom been more excellent than in this, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut. Dusty lives up to his nickname with a whiskered senior moment of a movie. (It’s best that Hoffman started late in the game; audiences won’t have to put up with too many more vanity projects like …
A group of children are evacuated to a Yorkshire village during the Second World War, where they encounter a young soldier who, like them, is far away from home. Based on a children's book by Edith Nesbit, originally serialised in The London Magazine during 1905 and published in book form. …