A Potemkin movie top to bottom.

Rating: 5/10 (28 May 2008)

I should at least start with what the movie does right. As many others have cited, the cinematography and settings are extraordinarily well done; plainly a lot of money and care went into that. The score is also evocative and is very well matched to scene, and the use of the typewriter as percussion is nothing short of brilliant. The movie is also very well cast, and the actors top to bottom do a very good job of portraying the characters and script they were given. Now that's aside, let's review:
The romantic leads have their happiness shattered by a jealous little snippet, and they never get it back, each dying in cruel fashion.
The molested girl marries her pedophilic rapist.
The aforementioned snippet never does, actually, atone, only coming clean when she's dying and has nothing left to lose, decades after the revelations would have done anyone any good, and even then has a problem with the truth.
You also have the constant flashbacks, some in near real-time, which after the first bit of Briony looking at the fountain scene are far more irritating than evocative; by an hour into the flick, we were downright scowling.
Toss in Titanic-esquire ripoffs like floating dead ladies, a few anachronisms (Lancasters in 1935?? Blowing the date of the Barham tube disaster? No constant strafing at Dunkirk?), and sorry, but another reviewer was dead on: the star-crossed-lovers-in-wartime thing has been done before, and far better. Of course the Academy fawned all over it, but I see no reason to do so myself.
5/10, and only for the things it did right.