The Bookshop (2017)

Felt like a great missed opportunity ... a flavour of post-war English small-mindedness, eccentrically 'off' characters in a Suffolk coastal town conspiring against the adventurous outsider trying to run a bookshop ... yet somehow it all fell flat for me. The actors weren't quite there, strange to see the likes of Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy struggling to make their lines work (under-rehearsed, perhaps, an unfinished script, cuts to the budget of the film ... who knows?).

Viewers are quite savy these days, so you can't really paper over the cracks with nice costumes and authentic sets and settings etc. There will be some outside Britain who view the film as another quaint old period drama depicting how the country used to be, good for the American market etc. To be honest though, BBC and ITV turn out dramas like this season in seaon out, so I'm not sure what director Isabel Coixet hoped to achieve with this particular adaptation. Sorry, but script and acting needs work, no getting round it!

I cried at the end of the film, when I realized one of its little 'big' ideas ... I won't spoil it for you, but for me personally that just added insult to injury!