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This simple yet charming film is perfect for young children.

Despite Gugu Mbatha-Raw's fine interpretation, the film feels predictable, as if it were fiction and not based on real events.

A jewel unpolished is still a jewel, and there are treasures here for those patient enough to seek them out.

Perhaps most impressive of all is how the themes of ambition, friendship and life-affecting decisions are dealt with without resorting to mush or cheesy-sentiment.

An honest musical understanding is displayed throughout and it provides a refreshing undercurrent in what might otherwise be a stiflingly familiar tale.

Padded in places and threadbare in others, like an old mattress.

It adds useful continuity to the psammead canon.

Despite the capable acting (Hopkins may overdo it but is still terrific at times), the whole thing feels rather dull and pointless.

Even the surprises are too well signposted to surprise

The kind of period drama that screams “festival launch” but doesn’t trust its audience enough to tell its story subtly or with any surprises.

The whodunit elements of these stories are as smart as a Saville Row suit.

From a technical standpoint, Vaughn and the cinematographer Ben Davies outdo themselves.

Certain scenes feel too glib and stagey, as though they’ve been doused with pop video gloss – particularly the snow, which surely had its own assistant, make-up artist and trailer.

This is comedy in the Shakespearean sense, the whole story revolving around the importance of luck.

There’s a refreshing straight-forwardness to Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets.

Character is too often, for all the quality of the cast, too heavily sketched, a little too clumsy.

No defense against a life less lived

Firth produces a subtle and deeply moving performance.

Plays out like a high spirited seasonal version of Threads.

The heightened sense of India's reality is mimicked by Park's style and Miller's creations, who are pushed into the realm of melodrama and perilously close to caricature in pursuit of gothic thrills.

A sprawling epic of our times – and all times.