Are they still allowed to make films like this?

Rating: 10/10 (15 February 2006)

I have just seen this film long after the hype and having read almost nothing about it - I have to say that this is the most overwhelming experience I have ever had in the Cinema. I wouldn't have expected it to affect other people in the same way but apparently it does.
It got to me because I grew up in England in the sixties (actually living next door to Lucy Barfield, the dedicatee of the original novel and of course the one after whom the youngest character is named) and I saw the last of that England that the picture captures so well in the opening scenes. I can promise you that those sparky and plucky English children we are presented with really were like that. And as for the evocation in those early scenes  the London Station, the Country Railway, the Professor's House  one wants to applaud even the aging and distribution of the objects in the rooms. The Mother saying goodbye to them at the station was a proper mother from those times, the fleeting expression on the face of the guard seeing the evacuee children off was a gentle English expression of the type that Orwell wrote about  this sort of attention to detail amounts to genius.
James McAvoy's charming and ridiculously moving Tumnus makes a perfect introduction to the land of Narnia, and the interplay between him and the wonderful little actress who plays Lucy is a joy to behold. And then we are into this story of Good and Evil, and it is made absolutely clear, in the true spirit of Lewis, that Good and Evil underlies the Deeper Magic and that there can be no compromise between them. Which is why I think the film has been so successful. These pukka English protagonists, of the type now routinely portrayed in films as sneering, rapacious, bigoted, you name it  show a true spirit of courage, humour, honour, loyalty, and courtesy which I am sure international audiences from wherever respond to deep down, but have been deprived of for so long.
So congratulations to all involved  congratulations to William Moseley for being indeed Prince Peter the Magnificent. Congratulations to New Zealand Director Andrew Adamson for demonstrating true Cinematic Genius of the type that conceals the hand of the maker -as opposed to the officially acknowledged Genii who are known only by their surnames  Kubrick, Scorsese, Hitchcock  and whose identities are immediately obvious after one scene.