pawebster

Very enjoyable - good script, seemingly pretty accurate historically, well acted, nice costumes, etc - but the budget must have been unusually small for such a project. The supposedly German buildings are crassly English - mostly Oxford - and have no resemblance at all to German architecture. It almost makes me wish for a bit of CGI or AI. If they couldn't afford to film in Germany, there are other central European countries with the right kind of architecture.

It's a fitting memorial to the terrible ordeal of Nazanin and her family and a tribute to the campaign waged by Richard and supporters. As a film, it suffers from the fact that the story is essentially simple and the outcome well known, so there is little tension. Also Joseph Fiennes plays Richard in a competent conventional way - i.e. As a frustrated, angry but still controlled man - but fails to capture the special nature of Richard Ratcliffe, who, through it all (it alwaysy seemed to me) radiated a brand of humanity of his own, almost a sweetness, which was moving in a way that doesn't quite come across here.

This film is full of anachronistic gaffes. One of the worst is the police in London demanding driving licence and "papers" as if they were the Gestapo. UK citizens didn't and so far still don't have to carry "papers". (The police can require drivers to produce paperwork at a police station within a week.) Hamilton not having those items would have been normal. Public buildings were black with soot in those days and there was a lot of war damage in 1950s' London. There is no sign of any of that here, nor of the freezing weather that Christmas - at least we should be able to see people's breath in the cold Abbey. I could go on and on. Writers and directors: do your research and don't try to depict what you can't manage.