Ladies in Lavender

Saw this one the other night with me mum. A young Polish man (Daniel Brühl) washes up on a beach in Cornwall during a storm and is spotted the next morning by two seventyish sisters out on a walk. Janet (Maggie Smith), who has been married but lost her husband in the Great War, and Ursula (Judi Dench), who has not, have him brought back to their house, where they nurse him back to health with the help of the their cook (Miriam Margoyles). It could go without saying that the movie is well acted by the principles as well as anyone else who puts in a line or two, but this alone isn't enough to overcome defects in the script, the direction, and what struck me as simply poor editing choices. Slow motion probably won’t be a good idea again until a movie of the Six Million Dollar man is made, and here this technique is made especially awful by slowing it down to stop-frame shots of such things as a lock of hair being dropped out of an opened hand, which makes a crude kind of sentimental sense, or of Dench and Smith walking along the beach, which made no sense to me at all. On the whole there isn't much to recommend here outside of the acting.