You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a Read more ...

If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.That is decidedly not the route taken by Devon's own Harold Fry (Mark Addy, inheriting Jim Broadbent's screen role) who embarks upon the Read more ...