One Day

One Day (2011) covers twenty years of two people and shows only one day from each year. Emma and Dexter meet on the night of their graduation, 15 July 1988. The film then looks at every 15 July for the next twenty years. The other 364 days are never shown; we work out what happened from the state they are in. The strength of the method is that people change in between and we see the change as a result rather than a process. One year they are together, the next they are not speaking, and nobody explains why. Dexter spends a long time wasting a life; Emma cannot find her work. Neither will admit for years what the relationship is. It is adapted from David Nicholls's novel and he wrote the screenplay himself. Anne Hathaway's Yorkshire accent has been criticised since the day it opened, and the British press wrote about it at length. Lone Scherfig directed. She is Danish and had made An Education. There is a hard turn in the third act, unexpected for anyone who has not read the book. It runs 107 minutes. Good for: relationship drama, stories told across time, and British film. Less good for: the ending is heavy and the film slams the door emotionally.