IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START.

London, 1953; a bureaucrat (Bill Nighy) learns that he will die of cancer and starts thinking of what he might achieve.

A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), made with an impressive degree of ambition and finesse, thanks to stylish cinematography, a superbly understated and moving performance by Nighy, and a very effective translation of the Japanese original, adapted to the British class system. Who else but ”Remains of the Day” author Kazuo Ishiguro could have done such a beautiful job with this thoughtful and gripping film?

Unfolds in similar fashion to Ikiru, with a charming friendship between Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood.

2022-U.K. 102 min. Color. Directed by Oliver Hermanus. Screenplay: Kazuo Ishiguro. Cinematography: Jamie D. Ramsay. Cast: Bill Nighy (Rodney Williams), Aimee Lou Wood (Margaret Harris), Alex Sharp (Peter Wakeling), Tom Burke, Adrian Rawlins, Hubert Burton. 

Last word: “[Ishiguro] really gave me a lot of time because I interrogated every bit of the screenplay. I was always asking for rewrites, always asking for changes and fixing this. I was relentless. In fact, he refers to me as having a savage approach to screenwriting where I seemed to hack away everything just to then put it back together the way it was. And I don’t think that every relationship [with a writer] is like that. He afforded me a lot of his time and a lot of his patience, which I’m very grateful for.” (Hermanus, The Moveable Feast)