Iris

The film tells the life of the novelist Iris Murdoch in two time frames at once: the Oxford years when she and John Bayley met, and the last stretch as Alzheimer's takes hold. Kate Winslet plays the young Iris and Judi Dench the old one, and the film moves between them through cutting alone, without explanation. Richard Eyre worked from Bayley's memoir, which means the story is told from inside his view of her for its entire length. Jim Broadbent won the Oscar for best supporting actor as Bayley, playing a stammering, disorganised man growing steadily more helpless without once asking to be pitied. The most contested thing about it is what it leaves out. Murdoch was a philosopher and one of the significant novelists of the century, and the film is interested almost entirely in her illness and her marriage. You watch a mind collapse without seeing much of what that mind made. Who it is for: British drama built on performance. Who it is not for: anyone curious about Murdoch's work.