Starring: Daniel Craig, Samantha Morton, Rhys Ifans
Director: Roger Michell
The film: Hitting the big screen late last year, this adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel of the same name is an impressively strong British production.
Director Roger Michell has scored big hits before - most notably with the light comedy Notting Hill (1999) and fast-paced court-paper mix-up caper Changing Lanes (2002) - but this is a separate entity: a drama that grips with no let up, whose only laughs are desperate ones. Although the drama, owes a lot to McEwan, naturally, the author has gone on record saying that he's glad screenwriter Joe Penhall made significant modifications, in the interest of visual storytelling.
The film's title is deliberately ambiguous. It's about both long-lasting love and about suffering the love of another person.
At the centre of this double meaning is English literature university lecturer, Joe (Daniel Craig) - a cynic when it comes to love, despite being in a happy relationship with girlfriend Clare (Samantha Morton), a sculptress with whom he lives. Despite never having married, Joe is wary of the institution and scorns love as unscientific claptrap whenever given the chance at social gatherings or in the lecture room.
As if this personal quandary, over which he obsesses, wasn't enough to keep Joe's mind (as well as that of Clare and his students) at perpetual unease, another love complication falls from the sky.