Nanny McPhee

Kirk Jones directs, but the shaping hand is Emma Thompson, who plays the nanny and wrote the screenplay, which took her nine years. She has said the Christianna Brand books she was adapting, the Nurse Matilda stories, contained no story and no structure, and her fix was to rebuild the material as a Western: a stranger arrives where order has collapsed, restores it, and then has to leave. That decision leaves the machinery in plain sight. The nanny counts out five lessons in her first scene and states her terms for staying, and each lesson learned removes one blemish from her face, so the children’s progress is legible in Thompson’s prosthetics. The film never asks what happens next, only how. Colin Firth plays a widower who must remarry within a month or see the children separated, and that deadline runs as a countdown underneath the comedy. Exteriors were shot at the Penn House estate in Buckinghamshire in 2004. The BBFC gave it a U, its widest certificate, with consumer advice citing mild language and sex references. A good fit if you want the five lessons announced in advance and the rest of the running time spent ticking them off. Not for viewers expecting the mother’s death to stay in the background; it is named and talked through with the children.