gavin6942 True story of a transatlantic business correspondence about used books that developed into a close friendship.Roger Ebert somewhat humorously wrote, "Miss Fiske was the librarian at the Urbana Free Library when I was growing up. She never had to talk to me about the love of books because she simply exuded it and I absorbed it. She would have loved this movie. Sitting next to her, I suspect, I would have loved it, too. But Miss Fiske is gone now, and I found it pretty slow-going on my own." That Ebert was a funny guy. As he notes elsewhere in his review, this movie is built on a very thin premise. And that is its ultimate downfall. While the movie is fun to watch, it has so little going on: basically two people corresponding about books to order. It's nice for a book lover like myself, but it did begin to wear after a while.

writers_reign It's strangely apposite that this more or less true story of an American Anglophile should be told in a style that is all but an homage to two great English writers, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan who personified the Englishness that Helene Hanf found so beguiling so it's fitting that the film 'borrows' the device more or less patented by Coward in Cavalcade and one he used again in This Happy Breed, that of telling a story against a backdrop of real events that effectively move the story forwards in a block of several years at one fell swoop. As others have noted here the cast, although led by two brilliant performances, also functions as a well-drilled ensemble that would have no trouble masquerading as a Swiss watch and it would be churlish to single out any one individual. Understated, tacit, art concealing art are descriptions that come easily to mind. A small gem.

sddavis63 It was about an era long, long ago - when people used typewriters and wrote letters and couldn't order everything online. Helene (Ann Bancroft) lives in New York City and has a love for old English books, but has no way to get them. Frank (Anthony Hopkins) runs an antiquarian book shop in London, and receives a letter from Helene one day asking him for help in finding the old English books she's looking for. That simple request leads to a decades long correspondence between the two, which blossoms into a friendship (made obvious in the latter parts of the movie, when Frank's rather formal and official sounding letters start to be signed off with "Love, Frank.")The two never meet. They just correspond across the ocean. If that doesn't sound very exciting, well, it isn't. You don't watch this for the excitement. It's a very human movie. It's neither exciting nor in many ways particularly interesting, but it comes from the heart. The "pen pal" type relationship between Helene and Frank is very touching, and one hopes throughout that somehow and at some time either Frank will come to America or Helene will go to England and the two will meet. That they didn't could have come as a letdown, and yet it really wasn't. The movie ended on the right note, as Helene finally does travel to London to see the book shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, but only after she's learned that Frank died suddenly and unexpectedly.We see a little bit of English and American history scattered through this movie. The British election that returned Churchill to power and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (not to mention the rationing that went on in London many years after World War II.) America, by contrast, is a land of plenty, but the student riots that break out in the 60's are depicted. It was an effective way of interspersing a bit of history among Frank and Helene's relationship.The structure of the movie perhaps meant that Hopkins and Bancroft (both excellent actors) were somewhat underused. Mostly, they narrated; reading the letters they wrote to each other while we saw background "action." But this is an effective movie, and it does touch your heart a little bit as you learn of Frank's death, and as Helene finally visits the book store. (6/10)

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Anyone who knows London knows and loves Charing Cross Road that has been able to resist any kind or urban change, even recent urban renovation, since I first stepped into it in 1960. I have walked it up to Tottenham Court Station and Road and down to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery more often than Champs Elysées in Paris or Broadway in New York. It is for me one street I love discovering every single time I am in London with all its book stores, Covent Garden on one side and Soho on the other side, Leicester square on that other side, and the National gallery at the bottom of the street not to speak of Saint Martin's in the Fields and its underground crypt where you can eat with the ghosts. Fifty years haunting that place, that road, its shops, theaters, churches and left or right hinterlands. The Strand next to it is nothing and I can live without ever setting one toe of one foot in it, but Charing Cross Road… This film is thus nostalgic about what it was, and still is, in spite of the death of two people and the closing of Marks books that I actually visited before it closed, or it might be another one, they were and are all just as beautiful and intriguing. But the film is not about nostalgia for some place you have visited and loved, not even a person you have loved and lived with in a way or another, but about a service you can only get from true secondhand bookstores because they don't sell books but they sell the books they love and cherish to people who love and cherish them just the same. These secondhand bookstores and booksellers have a charm that is not only quaint but is like an accomplice-ship in the crime of loving books, old books, beautiful books, books that have been used, visited and read by what we imagine are hundreds of people. The last book I got from England is from the University Library of Leeds, still with its barcode, its number, its Reference tag, its "not to be borrowed" tag and a book that was published in 1960, precisely, fifty years ago, a book no one can find any more except in university libraries and I have it on my desk, as if I had borrowed it and forgotten to give it back and left the country with it. That's what a second hand book is, and that's what this film is trying to make you feel by exploring the feelings of the bookseller and the customer, one in New York and the other in London, sharing (a perfect word for Charing Cross Street) the love of old books and the hunt and chase for them and the pleasure of a capture that can never be planned out and foreseen. No one can imagine what it means to hold an original edition of Walter Scott's novels and the communion with all those who have turned the fragile pages. Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins are rendering these feelings intertwined with real events from 1949 to the early 1960s, care packages and one coronation, plus plenty of New Year celebrations and Christmases, and we feel that spiritual love adventure among several grownups who will never meet and who are bringing together emotions and passions all connected to those books and the help one can bring to all the others in their hopes and sufferings. You will definitely see more of London than New York but London is the main character brought to life by two great actors and a sweet story.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID