Watch Their Finest For Free

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Brilliant and touching

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

These two films revolve around the near disaster of Dunkirk and though Darkest Hour may be the superior film, Their Finest is just as blessed with wonderful acting, especially that of Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy. For my wife Their Finest was the superior film as it tugged at her heart strings and centered around an impressive female lead, Ms Arterton as Catrin Cole, who in the story stumbles into a job as a screenwriter during WW2. She turns out to be quite good at writing 'slop' as her cowriter, Sam Claflin as Tom Buckley, refers to the female dialog and other 'filling' in a screenplay. It turns out that if a movie is to play authentic and optimistic as required by the War Department, you need a woman's touch. And in fact many mildly feminist points are made in this story.All in all a good movie to rent as DVD.

Yeap, it is, boring! For a story happening in the beginning of the most horrendous war on history, there is very little drama or action here. England was bombarded weekly, sometimes daily, but they barely cover the horror of it. The story is also very similar to other movies of beautiful women giving themselves to low life men and finding love on the most logical way, a working and a dedicated man. The cinematography is very good, and the directing too although the director commit the mistake of a slow and desperte tempo. All the actors are great with Mrs Arterton doing an excellent performance. It is the story which is very disappointing and boring.

Wartime-set drama (during the Blitz), that's part cap-tip to working women, part acclamation to the power of cinema.Arterton as the lead, Catrin, is hired early on as the sole woman on a small script writing team for the Ministry of Information, looking to the inspire the many at home and Americans abroad into joining the war in one swoop.Arterton is solid enough in her portrayal, and the script nuanced enough to push the stories & plight of women in general with tact -- no grandstanding here -- and she's an entertaining, bright foil to Sam Claflin's lead-writer Buckley.The romantic sub-plots here are a little to predictable, as is the denouement, thought Catrin is interesting enough for these to be passed off as forgivable.The film clearly takes some delight in it's portrayal of old-timey film-making, and the actors working on them (Bill Nighy a deft-hand here as usual).Entertaining, charming stuff here with a nice trim running time and engaging performances. Nothing especially stellar.

Lone Scherfig's "Their Finest" is an enjoyable watch, of that there is little doubt, though (or even perhaps because) it features one of cinema's most-surprising plot twists. It is also - it seems to me - a little unsure of what it is really trying to achieve.Though the Director is Danish and the Producers British and American, the book is a British one from Lissa Evans, and the film itself has a very distinct Ealing Comedy-type vibe (if strongly nuanced by death and sadness).Yet at moments it seems to go beyond being "a little film", heading instead in more-epic directions. It is hard to know how that happens, but it somehow does...The work has a flavour of Powell and Pressburger sweeping grandeur about it, hence one wonders if the Hungarian character of Gabriel Baker played by Henry Goodman is actually meant to be Pressburger. This would fit, given that "A Canterbury Tale" from 1944 features a real-life American serviceman Sergeant John Sweet (the goal being to stress the links between Britain and America), just as the film within the film of "Their Finest" - which is being made in an earlier post-Dunkirk phase of the War - features an American pilot in the shape of Carl Lundbeck played by American Jake Lacey.So is this a film about (the pastiches, lies or bendings of the truth demanded by) propaganda film-making? Always assuming such a term can be deployed in relation to something as beautiful as "A Canterbury Tale", or indeed Pressburger's other gems "A Matter of Life and Death" and "Colonel Blimp", to say nothing of Olivier's exquisite version of "Henry V"? Is "Their Finest" a semi-documentary in this sense? All the more since it occasionally presents, or at least alludes to, real-life wartime information films, and it does have a great deal of worthwhile comment to make about the reasons for such films to be made, and the ways in which they are made? Perhaps it is a not-entirely-funny comedy? Bill Nighy's role here would seem to suggest it is intended to be quite funny, and at times it is. But, in the end, there is too much respect for the real-life story to poke more than a hint of fun at the 1940s. Ultimately, that was "our finest hour", and nothing is going to change that view, or approach. But this is also apparently a film about the further chance at the advancement of women that World War II offered (just as had the First World War a couple of decades previously)? Certainly, there is huge emphasis put on this issue here - sometimes to the point of overkill; though it does, for example, allow us a joyous time with the increasingly omnipresent Helen McCrory as Sophie Smith.The biggest star here is probably "the War Effort", that grand and noble purpose occupying such a high proportion of the wartime population of my country, who got on with something (whatever it might be) as houses and streets continued to be demolished by bombing in a pretty random kind of manner (as "Their Finest" in fact indicates rather beautifully).Nevertheless, not quite everyone here is (or really was) a hero, as this piece makes clear with its ambiguous and enigmatic character of Ellis Cole, played by Jack Huston. Cole looks like he might not really be "doing his bit", yet here too there is nuancing, as he clearly had been prepared to step up a few years previously, fighting (presumably for the left) in the Spanish Civil War. Likewise, a World War I veteran alluded to in the film is unable to adjust to the peacetime world and directs his PTSD at the persecution of his twin daughters.My somewhat failing (or flailing) attempt to sum up a few of the threads in this film does much to indicate my state of mind about a piece that seems to slip between several categories without fully emerging into any one of them.Of course, that is by no means a sign that there is nothing worth watching here, and all the more so as Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin both do well here in a stiff-upper-lip "Brief Encounter" kind of way.So then this is a romantic film as well? There are also pretty compelling cameos by Jeremy Irons, Richard E. Grant and Eddie Marsan to enjoy, and at least a couple of locations so tranquil and beautiful that it reminds us again that Britain was fighting to defend itself and what it held dear, as well as to destroy somebody else's hideous evil...