The Railway Children Return

England, 1944. Children are evacuated from bombed Manchester to a village in Yorkshire. Three siblings are taken in by Bobbie Waterbury, who meets them at the station. Bobbie is the girl who once waited for her father at that same station; she now lives with her daughter Annie and grandson Thomas and takes in evacuees. One day the children find an American soldier hiding in a railway carriage, on the run. The idea inherited from the first film is the same: the railway is where children learn about the world. What differs here is that the war brings its own discrimination inside with it; the soldier on the run is Black, and what he is running from is how the army treated him. Morgan Matthews directed from a screenplay by Danny Brocklehurst. Jenny Agutter plays Bobbie, the part she played in the 1970 film. Sheridan Smith, Tom Courtenay and John Bradley are also in the cast. StudioCanal produced it, and it is a sequel to the 1970 film adapted from E. Nesbit's novel. Who it is for: family audiences and anyone who saw the first film as a child. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the tone of the original. The telling is more didactic, conflicts resolve quickly, and the question of racism is taken seriously and then closed off too easily.