Watch The Bookshop For Free

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This was a lovely film that was steady and heart touching. Books are my favourite and this film had many of them. Wish there were more film like this nowadays and it had the touch of manners and decorum thats often lost to time. It was refreshing.

A film that unbelievably has won awards; and a film that a first year film student would have rejected. It was shallow, incompetent, uninvolving, without a script, and with a wholly absent sense of shape. No pace, no drama, no direction. The Book Shop is a superb novel, but it has been made into a trite and boring film, without emotion or skill. The people who made this should be blushing with shame; they could not even get the books on the shelves right; several were recently published Penguin hardback editions, some were plainly and utterly WRONG. For instance, the wonderful Pentagram series designed for Faber didn't come out until the 80s, yet several are seen here. Few things were managed correctly; even the postman wore a laughably inaccurate uniform. A sluggish and entirely mistaken film, uncomprehendingly made by bunch of amateurs. Two good actors - Bill Nigh, Patricia Clarkson - were wasted. I want my money back please. This was 1959 without any evocation of 1959.

I really wanted to enjoy this movie and went along expecting it to be a typical, gentle, rather slow English nostalgia film. Which it was. But unfortunately the storyline just wasn't enough to overcome the ponderously slow dialogue and fairly weak acting.The most entertaining part of the film was when a lady in the back row of the cinema started snoring. Loudly.

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!