the audience applauded

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

This is a film which centres on its main character Tony Webster, played with great subtlety by Broadbent, uncovering some of the unintended effects of earlier actions, long forgotten and submerged under a conventional and safe life. A letter out of the blue from a lawyer reconnects the intelligent but somewhat oblivious Tony to both people and events from his past. In the film, like the novel, this exploration is partly worked out in conversations with his knowing and somewhat arch ex-wife superbly portrayed by Harriet Walter. Even though the memories are Tony's, his wife always seems to be one step ahead in understanding their deeper significance and and recognising her ex-husband's obtuseness and self-deceptions. Through the discussions and flasbacks, a painful affair is slowly uncovered involving Tony's erratic first girlfriend and his best friend from school, and the flurry of interactions between all those involved at the time have powerful and lasting consequences, most of which were hardly foreseen by Tony, who seems to have settled for a lack of curiosity through the long years that followed. It is the unravelling of those consequences and the affect that has on the main character that soon becomes the centrepiece of the film. In fine humanist fashion, Tony is dragged through slow realisation, regret, humiliation, introspection, and an honest reappraisal of what he has become, to finally reach a level of resolution that is both persuasive and heartening. The film and the performances manage to avoid any hint of sentimentality and self-congratulatory smugness in a completely satisfying way. An excellent film!

Not one person in this film had any sense of courtesy except the main character. He continually tries to be polite and everyone is rude to him. It was quite frustrating that he would not throw a comment back at them, his ex-wife, daughter, professor, ex-girlfriend, not one polite conversation that I saw. But then again I lost interest in the film.

Excellent movie. The real drama, utilising all rules of this art!

'The Sense of an Ending' is quite a demanding film. Its target audience is the mature + age, those who have in their minds and souls enough memories that have had the time to be forgotten or intentionally buried. It also demands some patience, as its characters, as many, probably most people in life, do not reveal themselves immediately and are neither exuberant, not very empathetic. It takes time to discover the human motivations of many of us, it takes cinematographic time to discover characters like the one of Tony Webster, the quasi-retired owner of a small shop of vintage cameras in London, who once aspired to become a poet. But then, in cinema as in life, you may be highly rewarded.The story, inspired by the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes, puts on screen a slow build-up of the young days of the main hero, who suddenly receives a small heritage from the mother of his ex-girlfriend, probably the great unfulfilled love of his university years. The almost forgotten affair with a girl named Veronica from presumably a higher class family is discovered by viewers and re-discovered by Tony, as his memories come back, some of them extracted with difficulty, exposed because of the need to share and despite the will to leave some of them forgotten. Actions in the past have had unknown consequences on the lives of other. Veronica was some kind of a mystery for the young man, maybe because of the class differences, maybe because men never fully understand women, or maybe because some dark family secrets that are never fully revealed and do not become more evident even after 40 or more years. The ambiguity of the details is part of the reason I liked the story, as in life out of books and screens not everything can and will be explained. However, the pieces of the puzzle come together and build for the hero and for the viewers an alternate, even if partial, version of the past. The final moral of the story is that changing the past can change the present or even the future. We are not only what we wish to be, we are also what our memories determine to make of us.The British style of living and being, its discretion and understatements fit so well this story. Director Ritesh Batra is only at his second big screens film. I hear that his debut in India with 'The Lunchbox' was kind of a sensation. He succeeds to lead with skill his wonderful team of actors, plays well the card of ambiguity, and seems to understand to details the soul and dilemmas of the characters. Attention however, it's also a personal story, so what we see on screen is always what the hero, Tony Webster sees, what we know is what he can and in some cases chooses to remember. Jim Broadbent is a wonderful actor and succeeds with talent and discretion in the lead role, even avoiding from us to become to engaged with him until he deserves it. I can be only sorry that Charlotte Rampling spends so little time on screen in this film, she is an artist I love and respect. Keeping the mystery around her character is however what was required by the script and needed here. The only more severe fault that I could find is that the younger actors playing the decades back flashback episodes do not resemble in physiognomies or characters their older selves. I could not recognize at all ones in the others. This gap left apart, 'The Sense of an Ending' provided me with one of the most sensible and thoughts-provoking cinema experiences lately.