Redundant and unnecessary.

How sad is this?

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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.

I am amazed at the positive reviews of this film! I was really shocked by the way it seems to have been thrown together.The first jarring presence is the theme by Michel Legrand, whose score though being enigmatic is completely out of place and mismatched to the country home setting, it sounds like a spy theme and is reminiscent of the era's John Barry/Iprcress File. This main theme is irritatingly repeated over and over at the expense of badly needed expository dialogue. Where is the dialogue? The great Harold Pinter must've taken all of an afternoon to write it all - a pitiable effort for such a great book. We are instead treated to endlessly repeated shots of Leo running back and forth through he fields in long shot. Joseph Losey has used no supporting players, opting instead to use what looks like Norfolk locals (why?) who are hopeless in delivering the simplest of lines and so are in many cases, dubbed. There is no atmosphere! The actors don't inhabit the house at all- the sound and lighting is terrible! Unfortunately the bulk of the story requires child actors, Leo just about gets away with it but the actor playing Marcus is awful, many scenes are botched and left in the edit I can only assume they ran out of time. The big scenes of cricket match and party after, so important to the story are completely ruined by terrible editing. Why is Leo's song not more imaginatively realised? It would have helped the story so much. Also Trimingham is meant to be repulsive, making him handsome kills one of the most powerful motivations for Marian's behaviour. The major cast are good but lack direction and a decent script they loo lost half the time! Honestly, I could go on I am so disappointed in this treatment of an amazing book which everyone should read (hopefully they haven't seen this first). And yes, please, someone do a remake! Even Michael Bay could do it better.

In the English countryside of 1900, a boy serves as a messenger between a young woman from a rich family who is engaged to be married to a viscount and a neighbor farmer of lower standing, facilitating a forbidden love affair. Like "Picnic at Hanging Rock," this is a very deliberately paced film where nothing much happens. The main point of interest is the atmosphere, marked by beautiful cinematography. However, with characters who are not terribly interesting and without much of a plot, the film really overstays its welcome at a running time of two hours. The acting is fine all around, including Christie and Bates in the lead roles of the lovers.

A gripping film, and often, thanks to cinematographer Gerry Fisher, also a beautiful one, with several stunning shots of the Norfolk countryside at harvest time. Harold Pinter's screenplay, in adeptly interweaving present and past, anticipates by some thirty years work by Christopher Nolan (Memento) and by David Hare (The Hours). Pinter and director Losey also succeed in capturing the suffocating English class system.Having never read L. P. Hartley's story on which the film is based, it's impossible for me to judge the extent of Pinter's faithfulness to it. On film, at least, I feel the finale doesn't quite come off, though I don't really know why. It may be because we don't really get to know the key character (SPOILER: it's Julie Christie's grandson, whom we see but never hear and don't get to know). The more significant revelation of the finale (another SPOILER) is that Michael Redgrave's character has been permanently scarred, emotionally blunted, by his childhood experiences as the message-bearer between Julie Christie's daughter of the manor and Alan Bates' rugged farmer. But, although Redgrave does his very best to suggest this, we have to take it on trust from Julie Christie's character - we never really get to know old Marcus. And of course to have built up any more of his life as an old man would have completely unbalanced the film, so the decision to keep it as oblique as possible was the right one. It just makes the end of the film rather unsatisfactory.Nevertheless, the story set in the "foreign country" of the past is spectacularly well-told, and magnificently acted, not least by the excellent Dominic Guard as young Marcus - a great screen performance. Bates, Christie, Edward Fox, Michael Gough - all reliably fine. As you sit watching the film, if you know anything about Margaret Leighton at all, you spend most of it wondering why this Rolls-Royce actress has been cast in what appears to be quite a small part. But then comes the climax of the film, and you realise why she's there. She's magnificent.It's worth mentioning the obsessive score by Michel Legrand. For many, it won't work. I found it irritating to begin with, but in the end I was won over by it. Not an unblemished masterpiece, then, but on the whole a compelling work of art.

Easily one of the best acted, best directed and most intellectually intriguing films I have ever seen. Julie Christie is so lovely that you will never forget her. The screenplay by Pinter is impeccable, building a rhythmic alternation of times and places, an alternation that ultimately crashes together. I have seen this movie several times - like Casablanca, it just keeps getting better - and have taught it to inner-city pre-freshmen - they loved it. They were not at all used to films that try to be artistic creations, and the slowness of the pace at first threw them off. However, once we explored the multiple levels of meaning and revelation in each of the initial scenes, they became drawn into the film, caught up in its mystery and romance and fascinated by the vision of a totally alien, yet oddly familiar, world. Losey at his best is on a par with Renoir. Why isn't this film on DVD? Even the background music is really good.