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This movie tells the true story of Alan Bennett's (Alex Jennings') strained friendship with Miss Mary Shepherd (Dame Maggie Smith), an eccentric homeless woman who Bennett befriended in the 1970s before allowing her temporarily to park her Bedford van in the driveway of his Camden house. She stayed there for fifteen years. As the story develops, Bennett learns that Miss Shepherd is really Margaret Fairchild (died 1989), a former gifted pupil of pianist Alfred Cortot. She had played Chopin in a promenade concert, tried to become a nun, was committed to an institution by her brother, escaped, had an accident when her van was hit by a motorcyclist for which she believed herself to blame, and thereafter lived in fear of arrest.

This slow-paced gem is about the civilizing influence of Italy on beleaguered Londoners, both male and female, and has its own civilizing influence on the viewer. It's almost like taking a little mini-trip to Italy, a gorgeously filmed enchantment.

In England in the early 1930s, twenty-year-old Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale), recently orphaned, and left with only one hundred pounds sterling a year, goes to stay with distant relatives on Cold Comfort Farm. Everyone on the gloomy farm is completely around the twist, but Flora tries to sort everything out.

In a touring Shakespearean theater group, a backstage hand, the dresser, Norman (Sir Tom Courtenay), is devoted to the brilliant but tyrannical head of the company. He struggles to support deteriorating star Sir (Albert Finney) as the company struggles to carry on during the London blitz. The pathos of his backstage efforts rival the pathos in the story of Lear and the Fool that is being presented on-stage, as the situation comes to a crisis.

Eileen is 22 and is smarting from her breakup with Russ. She comes to New York to visit her brother, Adam, who is an airline pilot. Eileen confides to her brother that she thinks she may be the only 22-year-old virgin left in the world. Adam assures her that sex is not what all men look for and insists he hasn't slept around. Of course, Adam is lying and is in hot pursuit of a tryst with his occasional girlfriend Mona. However, Adam's date with Mona has a series of job-related interruptions. Meanwhile, Eileen decides to see if she can have some fun for herself in New York, and seems to find the perfect candidate in Mike, a man she meets on the bus. But things get complicated when Russ pops in with a proposal and a mistaken assumption.

Victor and Hillary are so down on their luck that they allow tourists to take guided tours of their castle. But when millionaire oil tycoon Charles Delaceo visits, he takes a liking to more than the house. Then Hattie Durant gets involved and they have a good old-fashioned love triangle.

The divorce of Hugh and Miriam Halsworth becomes final at midnight. Hugh wouldn't dream of calling it off, but can't abandon his rose garden. Things change that afternoon, though, when Miriam's old suitor Victor Macfarland checks into the hotel where Hugh is publicity man. With Miriam's daughter Barbara rooting for Hugh and son-in-law Jerry rooting for Victor, things are unlikely to be resolved by midnight...

After their last production meets with less-than-stunning reviews, the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan is strained to breaking. Their friends and associates attempt to get them to work together again, which opens the way to The Mikado, one of the duo's greatest successes.

In November of 1924, a mysterious Hollywood death occurred aboard media mogul William Randolph Hearst's yacht. Among the famous guests that weekend were: film star Charlie Chaplin; starlet Marion Davies (who was also Hearst's mistress at the time); silent-film producer Thomas H. Ince (known for creating the first Hollywood-studio facility and for creating an "assembly line" system for filmmaking); and feared gossip columnist, Louella Parsons.

Mrs. Palfrey (Dame Joan Plowright), recently widowed after a long happy marriage, moves into a London residential hotel more lively and elegant on-line than in fact. She determines to make the best of it amongst an odd assortment of people, and she particularly hopes her grandson, a London resident, will visit. When she slips on a walk and is aided by penniless young writer Ludo (Rupert Friend), she invites him to dine at the Claremont and plays along when her dining mates assume he's her grandson. A friendship develops giving her a companion with whom she can talk about memories and poetry and giving him ideas and support for his writing. But what of her actual family? How it plays out is the movie's story.

Once upon a time there were two people in love, their names were Nina and Jamie. They were even happy enough to be able to live happily ever after, (not often the case) and then Jamie died. Nina is left with a house full of rats and handymen, a job teaching foreigners English and an ache that fills the night sky.

A charming and ambitious young man finds many ways to raise himself through the ranks in business and social standing, some honest, some not quite so. If he can just manage to avoid a certain very predatory woman.

In 1880s Salford, England, widower Henry Hobson, owner and operator of Hobson's Boots, lives with his three adult daughters Maggie, Alice, and Vicky in a flat attached to the shop. Henry is miserly, dipsomaniacal, and tyrannical, not allowing his daughters to date since their sole purpose in life is to serve him and the shop--for no wages. He changes his mind about Alice and Vicky, for whom he will choose husbands although they've also chosen the men they'd marry if they could. However, Henry won't provide them with dowries, which might be a challenge in finding them men he would consider suitable husbands. He considers Maggie far too useful to him as the overly-efficient, organized one, so doesn't intend to let her go--besides, at age 30, she's too old for any man to want anyway. Incensed by her father's attitude, Maggie decides to show him how wrong he is about her being an unmarriageable spinster by proposing to timid Willie Mossop, the shop's poor, uneducated, illiterate boot hand--yet best bootmaker, apparently better than any bootmaker in nearby Manchester--who has known no other professional life than the shop. They enter into a marriage of convenience. Despite the differences in their social classes, Maggie believes she can show her father that she can find a husband while also forcing him to treat Willie better (and by association her) in paying him decent wages, otherwise she will use her wifely influence to convince Willie to take his and her valuable services elsewhere. If their hands are forced, Maggie believes their best weapon is wealthy, particular Mrs. Hepworth, who said that only Willie shall ever make her boots. Maggie has even taken into consideration what effect her actions will have on her sisters' nuptials, vowing to them that all will be all right in that regard. Although she truly has no idea how her father will react, she hasn't considered Willie, who might already have his own life outside the shop. If he does agree, what effect will her plan have on him and his entire being?

A homely but vivacious young woman dodges the amorous attentions of her father's middle-aged employer while striving to capture some of the glamorous life of her swinging London roommate.

Based on Thomas Hardy's 19th-century novel, Bathsheba Everdene is a willful, passionate girl who is never satisfied with anything less than a man's complete, helpless adoration, and she captures the lives and loves of three very different men: Gabriel Oak, a sheep farmer, who is captivated by her beauty and proposes marriage; William Boldwood, a prosperous confirmed bachelor in his early forties; and Sergeant Frank Troy, a handsome, reckless swordsman given to sudden fits of violence.

Five centuries ago, a mural was created in a country church in the north of England, and then hidden under layers of white paint. Looking at it again will be a distraction, the Reverend Mr. Keach tells World War I veteran Tom Birken, who will spend a month in the country restoring the mural. Another veteran, James Moon, is looking for the grave of an ancestor of the patroness of the church who fought in the Crusades. The rector's wife, Alice, comes to see the mural and later visits Birken's bell tower abode, bringing a basket of apples. Will she open the book in which he has pressed the yellow rose she gave him earlier?

Married life is proving to be difficult for newlyweds Jenny (Hayley Mills) and Arthur (Hywel Bennett). With well meaning, but interfering parents, nosey neighbors, and a town that thrives on gossip, can their marriage last? With all these pressures it's no wonder their personal life is suffering. Will there ever be any good news?

For Alfie, the only real life is sex life. Only then, can he kid himself he is living. Sex is not used as the working-class boy's way to "the top". Executive status has no appeal for Alfie. Nor has class mobility. He is quite content to stay where he is, as long as the "birds" are in "beautiful condition", as he assures us they are in one of the candid, over-the-shoulder asides to the camera which this movie carries over from Tom Jones (1963). This movie shows how much of the "swinging 60s" quality of London life was a male creation, and through the dominance of the fashion photographers, a male prerogative.