Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

PoppyTransfusion Beginning in pre-WW2 London the story, based on Rosamund Lehmann's novel 'The Echoing Grove', concerns two sisters - Madeleine (Olivia Williams) and Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter) - who love the same man - Ricky (Paul Bettany). The story is told in flashbacks as the sisters meet for lunch post-WW2. Ricky is married to Madeleine and they have one son when he and Dinah fall in love and begin a torrid and emotional affair. When Madeleine discovers their affair, Ricky leaves her for Dinah but the result of a chronic illness intervenes and fate returns Ricky to Madeleine. Such are the vagaries of fate and circumstance that Ricky is never reunited with Dinah though he loves her until his untimely death. Instead he remains with Madeleine with whom he has another child, a daughter. Many years later the sisters meet for lunch and the events surrounding the affair form their conversation.All the leads are excellent: Williams has the most difficult role as her character is emotionally cold and the least sympathetic. She never flinches from portraying a woman who, in spite of her achievements in life, is threatened by her younger and more lively sister, who we learn was favoured by their father and this leaves its lasting effects upon Madeleine. Bonham Carter is in her element as a socially rebellious and artistic outsider in staid middle class society. Bettany is superb as the well behaved gentleman prepared to lose all for a love that would scandalise his society. His love for Dinah aches and proves his unwitting end.A very emotional and beautiful film cut through with tragedy, misunderstandings and missed moments. I defy anyone to watch this without a lump in their throat, at the least. The notion of touching and then losing true love in life is poignant and something that will be relevant to many.

robert-temple-1 This is everything one could possibly want a modern British period film to be: brilliant, sensitive, perfectly made, enthralling, revealing, informative, stimulating, and inspired. Did I forget anything? Oh yes, the wonderful script, cinematography, editing, costumes, sets, props, and just about anything else you care to name. The director is an inspired Irishman named Thaddeus O'Sullivan. And why has he not won an Oscar and is not making Hollywood blockbusters at a hundred million dollars a pop? Well, because he is too talented and real, that is why. The performances are magnificent and sublime. 2002 was a bumper year for Helena Bonham Carter, when she delivered possibly the two finest performances of her distinguished career. Maybe because she had found personal fulfillment with Tim Burton the year before, it was in 2002 that she made first this film and then 'Till Human Voices Wake Us', in both cases delivering performances which are staggering emotional masterpieces of the acting art. I wish she could stop wasting her time on Harry Potter and get more vehicles like this one. When she was younger, Bonham Carter was not 'sexy'. No man wanted to rip her off the screen and give her a squeeze. She was remote, quizzical, almost 'a funny little thing', despite her amazing talent. By 2002 she was as ripe as a plum, it was all there and oozing out like honey, all that emotion. She may not be a pin-up, but she is what they would call in an old noir movie 'one helluva dame'. (And let's hope she does become Dame Helena one day, for that matter, as she already deserves.) Not to be outdone, her sister is played by Olivia Williams. What a scorching, searing performance that is! She conveys so much on the outside which is concealed on the inside, that one wonders if she had been psychologically involuted specially for this film. What a study this is of sibling rivalries between two sisters! The two actresses seem to have a telepathic communion between them, as when one of them flickers an eyelid, the other winces. If one inhales, the other holds her breath. They were really living this, it was beyond acting. The man caught in the middle between these two lovelies is Paul Bettany, who is perfectly cast, whose performance is perfectly judged, and is delivered with such pervading melancholy and resignation to the Fates that it elevates this tragic love story to Olympian heights. Bettany's versatility was later to be proved when he played Silas in 'The Da Vinci Code', an almost incomprehensible transformation of an actor who here is the very model of a 1930s gent. The costumes are so totally amazing in this film that you want to faint with delight, just looking at them. Where did they get those materials from? How did they do it? This film is a genuine classic, and a model of its kind. It was not until the end credits that I realized I had just seen the screen adaptation of Rosamund Lehmann's novel 'The Echoing Grove', one of her few books I had never got round to reading, though she once told me she believed it to be her best. The film was so emotional and intense that when I saw this it triggered tears, because one of the most traumatic episodes of my entire life was being with Rosamund the day she died in 1990. I arrived to see her, and the woman looking after her left us alone in the house. At first our conversation was normal and lucid, but Rosamund began to go peculiar and fade in and out of consciousness. She started to hold conversations with imaginary people who were appearing to her, especially a young man whom she loved (she was then 89). Rosamund's two great character flaws in her otherwise wonderful personality were female vanity and uncontrollable romantic and sexual passion (as shown in the character played by Helena Bonham Carter). Rosamund was intensely passionate right up to the end, and can literally be said to have been in love on her deathbed, and was straightening her hair and reaching for her lipstick. I felt so desperately uncomfortable being the witness to all these deepest possible intimacies that I have tried for all these years to eradicate it all from my memory, looking at the details as too personal to Rosamund and none of my business. I tried my best to make her comfortable and help her, but after several hours it became clear to me that she was really dying and I had to call for help. She deserved and needed a close friend (as I was only an acquaintance) and of course the doctor. Rosamund was in no pain, but seemed to be being 'called' at last to rejoin her adored daughter Sally, who had died at 24, and whose death caused Rosamund to join the College of Psychic Studies and become a dedicated spiritualist in order to keep in touch with her, which she was convinced she had. And here I was, witness to Rosamund's contact with the spirits right in front of my eyes. I believe it was only four hours after I left the house that Rosamund was dead. The whole subject is so upsetting that I try never to think about it. I really do believe that people should not have curious spectators present at their deaths, however sympathetic they may be, such as myself. They need their friends and loved ones with them. And this did happen in her last moments. I am glad that this film, a perfect testament to Rosamund's amazingly brilliant talent and insights into human emotions, has been rendered on the screen. I do urge all who have a jot of emotion within them to see it, if only to pursue the hidden dynamics of feelings into the innermost recesses of the female heart.

rowmorg Why can't the private sector deliver sleepwalking junk-TV like this? Why does one of the few surviving public broadcasters on earth have to waste resources on such mediocre pap? The script should have been thrown out by BBC Drama execs on sight. It breaks all the rules. No hero, no heroine, no love interest, no sub-plot, no climax in the third act. It should have been binned right away. Only a director named "Thaddeus" could have been persuaded to take it on. Not one of the characters is even slightly plausible, and only their removal into some remote pre-war era gives them some spurious credibility. The working class --- er, that's 90 per cent of the UK population at the time --- is airbrushed out. Even the Second World War is reduced to the status of a prop and a 'deus ex machina'. Dinah and Madeleine obviously should have been swapped: Olivia Williams is irresistibly sexy even when playing a frigid wife, while the squat, pinch-faced Bonham-Carter has to plaster on the make-up to persuade her 40 years to look more like 30 (and definitely not 20). Paul Bettany struggles to make a manipulable goon and upper-middle class twit seem of consequence. His deeply unsympathetic behaviour and unmotivated, pathetic end (walking brainlessly into a Nazi bombing raid) plead for a well-deserved tearing up and binning. Rather than committing suicide, his character would have bought all the sex he wanted from the millions of sex-trade workers available in that era. Why throw up everything for a bisexual hippy? All three main characters seem to be desperately searching around for a sub-plot to give their lives meaning. Olivia Williams's agent should be shot.

Ralph Michael Stein I've heard that Western religious dogma eschews the thought never mind the act of a man lusting for his neighbor's wife. What really rocks the boat is a married man sappily and hopelessly enmeshed in the arms of his wife's sister. And that's what we have in this dark hued English drama whose scenes alternate between the pre-war social frivolity of affluent men and women unaware that their time was almost up and postwar scenes tieing the story together.Helena Bonham Carter is Dinah, a free spirit given to studying, and perhaps evangelizing, the gospel of malcontents and revolutionaries in that nonthreatening and oddly endearing manner that insures both bemusement and acceptance by well-to-do English gentlefolk. Olivia Williams is her married sister, Madeleine, a hostess with the mostess, married to businessman Rickie, played by Paul Bettany.The focus of the film is on this trio, not a menage a trois but a coruscating set of characters wracked by love, lust and confusion leavened by sporadic betrayal and reconciliation.It's really simple: Rickie sort of loves or at least very much likes Madeleine but his heart and other body parts desperately seek and need Dinah. Dinah loves her sister and her charming adolescent son but she must have Rickie. Madeleine loves both but is blind to the reality of their relationship until... A story of this genre must have a clear and unambiguous "until."Directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan, the acting of the three principals is, simply, mesmerizingly superb. Helena Bonham Carter is renowned for her period pieces (she can do much more and she does) and she fits into London's prewar world and its gray aftermath as if she actually experienced those times. Paul Bettany captures the lost male guided by his...ah, lust, with but minimal if any moral insight into his conduct. Special mention must be made of Olivia Williams who captures the pathos, hope and desperation of a decent woman swept up by acts of betrayal she never envisaged as possible. I hope we see much more of this fine actress.The score by Nicholas Hooper is very good but judicious editing was needed to reduce intrusiveness of the music and the sound level ought to have been lowered for a number of scenes.A fine production.8/10.