The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993)

The Merchant-Ivory partnership became synonymous for reasons good or ill with period dramas preoccupied with social class and the stifling effects of its rigid stratification. But you'd nevertheless be sorry if no-one had taken on the task, and Remains of the Day is one of the better examples. This is not so much because of Kazuo Ishiguro's original novel as the source, which I personally found bloodless, but because of Anthony Hopkins, in one of the performances that truly justifies his status as an actor of poise and control and not just the rent-a-thesp Hollywood has so often got him in for to do the nutters. As the butler Stevens, somnambulantly going through the routines through the decades in an English stately home, always too repressed to commit to either affection or opinions, you always get a sense of what is being held back, and he never overplays it. Unusually a film worth seeing for Hopkins alone, then.

7/10