Save your money for something good and enjoyable

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.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This adaptation of a newly discovered manuscript that was turned into a novel in 2004 is set during the German occupation of France in the 1940's. German soldiers were billeted in the homes of the locals in the village of Bussy.Lucille Angellier (Michelle Williams) lives with her wealthy and domineering mother in law, Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas.) Each sunday they would stealthily collect rent from the tenant farmers on their land. Lucille's husband is away fighting, thought now to be a prisoner of war.The Angellier household is joined by handsome, cultured German officer, Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts) a musician before he became a soldier.Both are attracted to each other in a village where the war has complicated things. Madame Angellier remains a patriot having little to do with the Germans but still sees an opportunity to make money. Some of the women sleep with the German soldiers in a village that was deprived of men. Some of the wealthy people in the village like the Viscount manage to carry on regardless by keeping their chickens, rooms and power. Others suffer especially as some of the villagers settle scores by gossiping to the Nazis by writing poisonous letters. Lucille feels hell bent to help out one of her tenant family who is being harassed by a Nazi officer, willing to take risks.This is a handsomely mounted film well acted by Scott Thomas and Williams. The story is not deep, Bruno is not regarded as a token good Nazi, he is willing to overlook the actions of what some of his fellow officers may have done in the past but his feelings for Lucille seems genuine.

Having just read the book for a book group, I looked forward to this. To describe it as a travesty would be too kind. I realise that films can't treat books literally, that they need to translate literary effects into cinematic ones, but this isn't the problem here. Rather it's that the subtleties of the book are ignored by a film which tramples on them with jackboots and despoils the central relationship for no obvious reason. It's a cruel insult to the grace and candour of Irene Nemirovsky, who died in Auschwitz without finishing what might have been the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Read the book instead.

Despite its title (a reference to a piece of music) and its setting (occupied France early in the Second World War), this is largely an English-language film with a British co- writer and director (Saul Dibb) and an international cast. American actress Michelle Williams plays the French villager Lucile Angellier and Belgium actor Matthias Schoenaerts is the German officer Lieutenant Bruno von Falk who become romantically involved. The first half is rather slow and plodding but then the plot picks up. What makes the characterisations interesting is that Bruno is represented as an essentially good German, while many of the French are shown in a less than flattering light.The film is actually an adaptation of the second of two stories that was intended to be a novel of five tales written in French by Irene Némirovsky, a woman of Ukrainian Jewish descent who was deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942 where she died of typhus. Némirovsky's older daughter kept the notebook containing the manuscript for fifty years without reading it but, when she discovered what it contained, she had it published in France in 2004. The film adaptation was released ten years later.

Following in the genre of war-romance. This film is set in 1940 France, featuring a young girls journey through the hardships of a German invasion. Michelle Williams played character, Lucille, extraordinarily showing emotions flipping throughout the plot. With not so high a rating, I was surprised by the way the film took pleasure in diverting my mind on the expectations I had for its ending. With some parts showing a melodramatic town atmosphere, it however creates a modern twist on an unexpected love connection, during a time in which such relationships were not even thought of. A great film to watch, if you are looking for a different angle on World War 2 romances.