Michael Wynne Movies

Two young women find love under difficult circumstances in this distinctive drama. Mona (Natalie Press) is a 16-year-old girl living in a small English town. There has never been much to do the neighborhood, and there's even less going on now that her older brother, Phil (Paddy Considine), who runs the local pub, has become a fanatical born-again Christian and is turning the tavern into a hall for prayer meetings. Tamsin (Emily Blunt) is another teenage girl who lives nearby; her mother is a successful actress who is usually away on projects, and her businessman father is too busy with his mistress to pay his daughter much attention. When Mona and Tamsin meet, they fall instantly in love and begin an erotic involvement. However, they soon discover that it isn't easy to keep their budding romance a secret in such a small town. My Summer of Love was enthusiastically received in its premiere screenings at the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett) spends several days at the races in the Conan Doyle mystery "Shoscombe Old Place." Holmes' client is an English lord who faces ruin at the hands of an old enemy. Murder and extortion are key ingredients in this 50-minute dramatization. Before everything is straightened out, Holmes has unearthed many an unpleasant deep, dark secret. This entry from the British Casebook of Sherlock Holmes TV series was released to American television and to U.S. video stores almost simultaneously. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Except for the omission of several passages in the original play, this 1970 adaptation of Julius Caesar faithfully retells Shakespeare's account of events surrounding the assassination of Caesar in 44 B.C. The film begins when Caesar John Gielgud is at the height of his power after conquering Pompey "the Great" in a civil war. Important senators worry that Caesar means to become king, diminish their power, and abolish their beloved Roman republic. Two senators, Cassius Richard Johnson and Brutus Jason Robards, hatch an assassination plot involving other disenchanted Roman citizens. Although a soothsayer warns Caesar of trouble ("Beware the ides of March") and his own wife reports ominous signs ("A lioness hath whelped in the streets; and graves have yawn'd, and yielded up their dead"), Caesar decides to go to the senate on the ides (March 15). Upon arrival, the conspirators greet him with daggers. In his funeral oration, Mark Antony Charlton Heston extols Caesar and incites the citizens against Brutus and the other conspirators. Brutus and Cassius flee Rome with their armies, but Antony and two other sympathizers track them down with their armies. When the tide turns against the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius commit suicide. As does Shakespeare's play, the film leaves the discerning viewer wondering who was the real villain -- Caesar, because of his ambition for power, or Brutus, because of his underhanded plot to maintain the status quo. ~ Mike Cummings, All Movie Guide

Based on the mystery novel by Marryam Modell (using the pseudonym Evelyn Piper), Bunny Lake Is Missing is a bizarre study in motherhood, kindness, enigma, and insanity. Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), an American freshly relocated to England, wishes to drop off her daughter Bunny for the girl's first day at a new nursery school. Oddly, Ann cannot locate any teachers or administrators, only the school's disgruntled cook (Lucie Mannheim). She is forced to leave Bunny unsupervised in the building's "first day" room, under the reassurance that the cook will be responsible for the child. When Ann returns in the afternoon, the cook has quit and Bunny Lake is missing. The school's remaining employees vehemently deny ever seeing the child, and Ann desperately calls her older brother Stephen (Keir Dullea) for help. Ann was raised fatherless and never married; she and Bunny have lived under Stephen's care and protection for the majority of both their lives. Stephen is enraged by the irresponsibility of the staff, but as Scotland Yard begins its investigation, it comes to light that he had never officially enrolled a child at the school. When Police Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) begins to unravel the Lakes' lives and search their belongings, he discovers that not only did Ann once have an imaginary childhood daughter named "Bunny," but that the young Bunny seemed to have no tangible possessions at the Lake apartment. Bunny Lake (whom we have yet to see onscreen) may not be missing: she may not even be real. Terrified that Newhouse will now abandon the search for the girl, the hysterical Ann sets out to prove her sanity and, in the process, surprisingly uncovers the true psychosis behind the disappearance of her little Bunny Lake. ~ Aubry Anne D'Arminio, All Movie Guide

In this British drama, a seventeen-year-old girl flees from her dreadful home and hitchhikes to London's Soho district. There, a carnival fortune teller befriends her and helps her get a job waiting tables. Her new boss makes sexual advances and the girl rejects him. She in turn makes a successful play for an aspiring singer. He impregnates her and they marry. They decide to move to Canada, but they need cash so the singer burglarizes their employer's home. Unfortunately, the employer awakens during the theft and shoots the singer. The wounded singer retaliates and kills his boss; he then steals a car, grabs his wife, and flees with the police in hot pursuit. They move in closer and the cornered killer tries to hold them at bay until he drops dead from blood loss. His wife sobs beside his crumpled form. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Based on Jules Verne's novel Captain Grant's Children, In Search of the Castaways is a roller-coaster of a Disney film, making up in excitement what it lacks in credibility or coherence. Hayley Mills and Keith Hamshere play the children of long-missing ship's captain Jack Gwillim. By chance, a note stuffed in a bottle comes to the attention of the kids and professor Maurice Chevalier; the note contains the fragment of a map, which suggests that Gwillim is somewhere in South America. Only after enduring a series of life-threatening adventures do Chevalier and the kids discover that they should have been in Australia all along! Once they're finally in the correct corner of the world, our protagonists are bedeviled by gunrunner George Sanders, the fellow who'd set the captain adrift. With the help of Wilfrid Brambell, a looney ex-crew member of the captain's (and the fellow who sent the bottled message), Chevalier, Mills and Hamshere are finally reunited with Gwillim--and as a bonus, Mills has found a boy friend, in the person of Michael Anderson. It's typical of the crazy-quilt approach taken by In Search of the Castaways that Maurice Chevalier decides to sing a cheery song in a moment of dire peril. Even so, the film was ideal Saturday-matinee fodder for the kiddie trade in 1963. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Produced and directed by Otto Preminger, Exodus is a 212-minute screen adaptation of the best-selling novel by Leon Uris. The film is concerned with the emergence of Israel as an independent nation in 1947. Its first half focuses on the efforts of 611 holocaust survivors to defy the blockade of the occupying British government and sail to Palestine on the sea vessel Exodus. Paul Newman, a leader of the Hagannah (the Jewish underground), is willing to sacrifice his own life and the lives of the refugees rather than be turned back to war-ravaged Europe, but the British finally relent and allow the Exodus safe passage. Once this victory is assured, 30,000 more Jews, previously interned by the British, flood into the Holy Land. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide