Notting Hill

Roger Michell’s 1999 film starts when the most famous film star in the world walks into William’s small London travel bookshop. Almost the whole picture is flatly shot conversation. Its one formal move is the change of seasons, William walking Portobello Road with a broken heart, and that apparently unbroken shot was filmed in a single day, with Framestore CFC morphing four plates together and adding rain, leaves and snow. Nothing else in the 124 minutes reaches that size. The locations are not what they look like. The shop on screen was Nicholls Antique Arcade at 142 Portobello Road, while the real travel bookshop behind it stood round the corner on Blenheim Crescent and closed in 2011. The blue door was screenwriter Richard Curtis’s own house, and the flat behind it was a set at Shepperton. It took 364 million dollars worldwide, past the 246 million of Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral. A good fit if you want the postcard neighbourhood and two hours of courtship talk, with the seasons walk the only flourish. Not for you if you cannot park a film set in a centre of Caribbean migration holding no Black character. Curtis, asked about it by his daughter Scarlett at the 2023 Cheltenham Literature Festival, said he had been stupid and wrong.