It Always Rains on Sunday.

"You could call the secret loves in It Always Rains on Sunday noirish, yet the passion and torments of its women are grounded in an East End locale that feels kitchen-sink-real," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "The 1947 Ealing Studios drama by Robert Hamer, best known for the Alec Guinness black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, is frank and bracing in ways that we're not used to seeing in a movie from this period, marking a very worthy rerelease by Rialto."

"It Always Rains on Sunday is a masterpiece of dead ends and might-have-beens, highly inventive in its use of flashbacks and multiple overlapping narratives, and brilliantly acted by [Googie] Withers and [John] McCallum," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Compacted into a breathless 90 minutes, the entire film exists in a state of high anxiety—not a frame is wasted."

"That this slice-of-life melodrama collides with a fugitive-on-the-run thriller makes Sunday a most notable installment of 1940s British cinema," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "But it's when things go from gray to pitch black in the film's final moments, building to a climax that links the anguish of a prison inmate with the daily routine of a working-class wife, that Sunday delivers an existential wallop for the ages."

"Hamer handles the clockwork plot with precision and shoots a final chase scene with panache," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's a cannily crafted and satisfying entertainment, which isn't the same thing as claiming it has a point."

At the Film Forum through March 13.

Posted by dwhudson at March 7, 2008 12:17 PM