Judith Margaret Steiner

Very drole. Very grown-up, subtle comedy. It takes the Mickey out of contemporary life. I loved it. Why only 3 series?

This is a good and enjoyable film, but it helps if you know a little history of the 20th century. The plot centres around a German officer who is put in charge of guarding the German Kaiser and his wife, exiled and living in the Netherlands since the end of WWI. The year is 1940 and the Nazis are having a successful year. The acting is superb, in quite a few cases exceptionally so, particularly Eddie Marsan as Himmler, and Christopher Plummer as the irracible Kaiser Bill. There is nudity, but not gratuitously so. There is also violence. It takes place during WWII. The story is plausible, and the film held my attention from start to finish.

While, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Messerschmits, Heinkels andJunkers take to the sky, WWII airplane buffs go to 7th Heaven watching this film. The famous reviewer, Leslie Halliwell, thought it was plodding. It isn't. It tells the story of The Battle of Britain accurately and concisely. Little attention is paid to accuracy of dress, and the anachronisms in the women's hairstyles (very 1960's) or plumbing (certainly not 1940) are all over the film. Now, used to a precise depictions of period (Foyle's War, for example), Susannah York's cute curly bob looks ridiculously out of place. But the tension is maintained and it's very entertaining to watch.

Stories all have a beginning, a middle and an end in the real world. Nowadays, in the reel world, directors have taken to, I hope, a short lived fashion, for mixing up time. Greta Gerwig's Little Women is one of the most recent offenders. Unless you knew the story well, with her jumping backwards and forwards in time, you never really connected with the characters, let alone knew where you were in the story. The Aeronauts suffers from the same problem. Jumping back and forth from the end to the middle to the beginning of the story, the audience is unable to connect emotionally with the characters, or even really understand them. It's a shame, as the film is a waste of some spectacular special effects and very fine actors.

Grown-up television from the Americans. It's wonderful.