Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: A young, beautiful widow moves into a quiet Irish village that's chock full of widows, and she begins to romance and scheme her way into the local society.
Biased, pithy comments: This is a movie you can watch once, and once only---it's a ``We're all living in a jar of Tang,'' movie, where the writer whips back the curtain at the very last minute and cries ``Aha! Fooled you!'' And certainly, you feel used, but you also wonder why you hung around through the entire first half of the movie when you didn't know the MacGuffin. Still, Plowright, Richardson, Dunbar, and Broadbent are really acting their hearts out, charmingly bringing to life a little Irish town just after World War I, complete with nationalistic and elitist fervor. I'm less of a fan of Masterpiece Theatre than others, so the sort of lurching plot maneuvers outweighed the atmosphere, which managed to seem foreshortened and still got in the way of the plot. This was a thriller at odds with Jane Austin.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Mia Farrow, Joan Plowright, Natasha Richardson, Adrian Dunbar, and Jim Broadbent.
Directed by: John Irvin