A dramatization of the twenty-year correspondence between New York litterata Helene Hanff and a London book dealer she never met. This basic material, with its excessive necessity for voice-over recitations, will hardly commend itself beforehand as very intrinsically cinematic; and the deep-rooted reverence for books at the core of it (coupled with its disdainfully modest commercial aims) threatens to become a club wherewith to beat contemporary movies and moviegoers ever so politely over the head. Neither of these initial misgivings proves to be much of a bother. It could be conceded that David Jones's mise-en-scène is little more than subserviently illustrative — and it would be a more damaging complaint that, despite the heavy balance of screen time in favor of the Hanff character, we learn much less about her personal life than we do her transatlantic pen pal's — but it is lovingly, evocatively, painstakingly illustrative, nonetheless. And the appreciation, in all senses, of books as objects is quite nearly cinematic enough — every bit as much so as the comparable appreciation of a gift of tinned ham in postwar England or, in reciprocation, a hand-embroidered linen tablecloth in a one-room Manhattan walk-up. And book people, as we've seldom been reminded since the official capitalized sect of them in Fahrenheit 451, are good and decent and valuable people; and this much-overdue tribute to the type, unfairly underrepresented on screen as against randy teenagers and crack anti-terrorists, is eccentric, warm-hearted, gently moving, highly civilized, and a few other things not often found amid the intrinsic cinematicness of car crashes and bazooka blasts. Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd