La dynastie des Carey-Lewis

Hard to pick out the worst features of this appalling meander of 199 minutes.

The plot of the book was hammered down to harlequin type segments with unnecessary naked flashes to keep the leer set interested.

Emily Mortimer was a trial all through, with her twinkling and winking and blinking and sorry leaky eyes the main feature for reels of film.

Peter O'Toole was great as the colonel but his back story was trashed along with the others.

Emily shows a real nasty side when it comes to her traumatized young sister who has lost both mother and father. Yelling and tugging at her. (What?) All the love interests make absolutely no sense, with "the love of my life" being forgotten rather quickly in settling for the lesser stodgier male.

Penelope Keith shone in a part well suited for her. The cheerful Auntie Mame feminist.

There's a great series buried underneath this careless treatment of a good read.

2/10 for the war-ry bits and some of the settings (beach, shelter) but a complete waste of time.

Sprawling but superficial mini about an unlikable family at the verge of WW II. They live on an estate on the Cornish coast and are impacted by the war.

Despite top billing for Peter O'Toole, the main characters are the daughters plated by Emily Mortimer and the unlikable Katie Ryder Richardson. As the gals maneuver thru the war, we also get the stories of the other family member and the men in their lives.

Despite some good production values, the story just seems flat. There's not much detail. We just glide along like an ocean breeze while the characters live their lives. The three star actresses mentioned above just don't get much to do and we wallow in the daily doings of the uninteresting younger set.

Co-stars include Paul Bettany, Patrick Ryecart, David McCallum, Susan Hampshire, and Charles Edwards.

With Knightly and O'Tool as the leads, this film had good possibilities, and with McCallum as the bad guy after Knightly, maybe some tension. But they threw it all away on silly evening frill and then later on with maudlin war remnants. It was of course totally superficial, beautiful English country and seaside or not.The number one mistake was dumping Knightly so early on in the film, when she could easily have played someone a couple of years older, instead of choosing someone ten years older to play the part. They missed all the chances to have great conflict among the cast, and instead stupidly pulled at the easy and low-cost heartstring elements.

A 4-hour romance novel set in Britain before during and after WWII. The heroine falls into a fortune near the beginning and nothing much worse happens to her after that. I hoped for a couple more plot twists, but even so, it has its charms, and I looked forward to finishing all 4 episodes. Good acting. Fair-Poor direction. Horrible soundtrack reminiscent of an oatmeal commercial.

American viewers will be surprised (well, I was) by the partial female nudity that pops up every hour or so just as interest starts to flag.

British to its backbone this mini is entertaining even if the goings on are a bit cliché. The settings are the beautiful especially the main house of Nancherrow. Chock full of extraordinary actors, Peter O'Toole, Joanna Lumley and Susan Hampshire just for starters, in support where this suffers is in the main roles. The actress playing Loveday is unmemorable but that can be ignored. The real problem is Emily Mortimer, it isn't even all her fault for she is a decent actress but having someone with as much charisma as Keira Knightley play the character as a young girl and than switching to someone who doesn't hold the screen in the same way for the bulk of the story is bound to cause a something of a letdown.