Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I would love to have given this film a much higher mark, but i felt it missed a golden opportunity to produce a potential classic. It has all the right ingredients, a good likeable cast, a topical subject with the recent films on dunkirk and churchill raising interest in this era, a clever premise of them making a film within a film, and there are some nice lines and good performances (Bill Nighy is excellent as always) but for me they blow it through the death of one of the leading characters. I understand they may have felt they were making a point about war, but for me they were being too clever. A nice happy ending would have left the film as a classic feel good film, like a "local hero", instead of a slightly frustrating one. This is especially annoying as within the film Gemma Artertons character is advised to make sure one of their films has a happy ending. A pity they didn't heed their own advice.

During the Blitz a struggling copywriter gets a job to help write a propaganda film about the Dunkirk evacuation, but the men in her life are not always helpful ...Lovely period drama, with a good balance of humour and hurt, and well produced all round. It's a long run time, but the pace is good, and the location switches keep the interest up. The story is love in a time of war, and there are several ups and downs amid the grim cruelty, with the added irony of the characters suffering the screenwriter's trick that they themselves apply: keep upping the ante until they have no choice but to resolve their predicament. There's also amusement in the camera trickery.One complaint: there is a brutal twist, which does tie in with the theme of life not being structured like stories, but I am bewildered by it and feel it wasn't handled right.Some of the humour comes from the chemistry between the screenwriters, but mostly from the crew on set down by the seaside, where Bill Nighy is on good form. The lead actress shows how good she is with quality material, and the cast delivers a solid performance. I particularly liked the scene with the twin sisters in Devon.Overall: Heartening romance that lets in the light and the dark.

Imagine your country fresh into the active part of a war you're not winning. You need a job and wind up on the screen writing team of a group of actors and producers who are putting together a patriotic war film of the recent fiasco in France culminating in the disorganized rescue of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the beaches at Dunkirk. As you are doing all this, bombers are flying over your head and you keep losing bits of the set and various co-workers.This is the tale told in "Their Finest" a well-done film of the type that the British still manage to pull off, going into their past and providing believable representation of a different time.The simple to describe task of turning out a creditable patriotic war film is complicated by the various parties who review the work and not only critique the film, but have the power to make major changes what appears to be any time. The characters are continually at work making allowances for a script that does not follow reality because the reality was much more mundane than drama calls for, or when actors renege or forced upon cast members can't act, or a script-writer is called away.The cast is well chosen and capable and attractive. The movie set within a movie is cleverly written and depicted. This movie is entertaining, draws the viewer in, does not 'appear' to be full of surprises but was clearly a work of technical expertise that paid off.

My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from our public library.The story starts in 1940, England is in a bad way with Germany bombing them often. They desperately want the USA to enter the war but, as we know now, it took Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941. Still, this movie is about making a film that not only would help keep the British calm but adding an American hero might get the USA more interested.Back in the 1940s there was no TV, not much radio, so it was mentioned that 30 million Brits, plus 90 Million Americans, attended movies. "Movies are like real life but with the boring bits left out."Gemma Arterton is Catrin Cole, a secretary, but with most of the young men in the war her writing was noticed. It was good, she was recruited to help develop the story and script for the movie. She has to work with Sam Claflin as writer Tom Buckley, in general looking down upon women, but somehow, gradually the two form attractions for each other. Catrin goes by "Mrs" but isn't actually married. When she goes back home to surprise her boyfriend and finds him in bed with a woman that takes care of that.My favorite here, as in many movies he is in, is Bill Nighy as snooty veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard. And, in a smaller role, Jack Huston is good as the cheating artist boyfriend Ellis Cole.Overall a pleasant, entertaining movie. But being primarily British it is often difficult to make out what they are saying, especially Claflin's lines, he tends to mumble a lot so we had to turn on the captions and replay important segments to fully understand what they were saying.