Choppy waters

As there were no invites this week from Hollywood movie stars — I thought Nicole Kidman might ask me over for a girls’ night in, to do face packs and nails and stuff, but not a squeak — I have to get back to the business of reviewing, and so here we are with The Deep Blue Sea. This is Terence Davies’s take on the Terence Rattigan play of the same name, and it’s awfully, awfully good — superb acting; superb sweeping crane shots; a superb evocation of postwar London in the Fifties — but it somehow fails properly to come to life. A new Davies film is, of course, a celebration, and this is his first narrative one for 11 years, but I think it may be too good for its own good, if you get my drift. (Don’t worry if you don’t. There are days when even I don’t get my own drift and have to chase it up the road.)