Summerland

In the summer of 1940, with the Battle of Britain overhead, a boy evacuated from London is deposited on the doorstep of Alice, a writer living alone on the coast whom the village treats as a witch. She studies folklore, in particular the natural explanation for floating cities seen in the sky, and the film's ending reveals that this preoccupation was never idle. Jessica Swale is a playwright and this is her first feature. Gemma Arterton takes the lead and Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays the woman from Alice's past, a relationship placed at the centre of the story and treated far more openly than period drama usually allows. Penelope Wilton, Tom Courtenay and Siân Phillips fill out the village. It opened in the United Kingdom on 31 July 2020. Its weakness is the coincidence it ends on. A resolution built on chance undercuts the careful realism of everything before it. Who it is for: viewers who love wartime British drama. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot forgive a contrived ending.