Janet Mcteer

With a story that links together every cliche from the weepy chick-flick library, this movie uses its doomed romance premise to reduce every woman in the audience into floods of tears. Adapted by author Jojo Moyes from her bestselling novel, the movie will work its trickery on its target audience, and it will just about keep others interested, thanks to engaging central performances by Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin.

It's set in a picture-perfect British village located next to the ruins of a picturesque castle, where the quirky Louisa (Clarke) has just lost her job as a waitress in a tearoom. But her parents (Brendan Coyle and Samantha Spiro) need her income to make ends meet, so she takes a job with the village's most prominent couple (Janet McTeer and Charles Dance), caring for their son Will (Claflin), who was a high-flying banker until he was hit by a motorbike and paralysed. Working alongside Will's nurse Nathan (Stephen Peacocke), Louisa struggles to connect with the relentlessly surly Will, who believes that there's no point with going on with his life. But Louisa is determined to help him find some hope.

Everything that happens on the way to the unnerving conclusion is deeply predictable, because we've seen it all in movies from Bridget Jones to The Fault in Our Stars. Even the gently wacky romance feels oddly by-the-book, shifting from interested sideways glances to another smiley montage sequence to contrived comedy and gloomy drama. Thankfully, Clarke and Claflin breathe life into these characters, adding personality details and a spark of chemistry that helps the audience feel the connection developing between Louisa and Will. Of the supporting cast, only Peacocke manages to give his character a sense that he has a life off the screen. And it's nice to see Downton Abbey's Coyle against type.

Continue reading: Me Before You Review

In 1898, Albert (Close) works at an upscale Dublin hotel, and no one suspects that he's actually a woman. Quietly going about his work while saving to open a tobacco shop, Albert is unassuming and relentlessly polite. Then he's asked to share his room with visiting painter Hubert (McTeer), who learns his secret and reveals one of his own: he's a woman too. But Hubert has managed to have a normal married life. This inspires Albert to pursue the hotel maid Helen (Wasikowska), which is complicated by her lusty relationship with handyman Joe (Johnson).

Continue reading: Albert Nobbs Review

In early 1900s London, single dad Arthur (Radcliffe) is a young lawyer in trouble with his boss (Allam), so his next case is make-or-break. To settle an estate, he heads to an isolated Northeast village that gives him a cold-shouldered welcome. And when he gets to the abandoned seaside mansion, he sees the spectre of a woman (White) lurking in the corners. A friendly local (Hinds) is cynical about this, even though it also haunts his wife (McTeer), who is grieving over their son's death. And dying children are a theme in this village.

Continue reading: The Woman In Black Review

While working on a human geography project as part of her studies, Nikki (Press) travels to an isolated Scottish island and presents herself as a prospective tenant at isolated house owned by her birth mother Phyllis (McTeer), who doesn't recognise her. As she plots her revenge against the woman who abandoned her, she's surprised to discover that she has a brother, Calum (Morgan). But her continual questions about their husband-father are blanked, and life on the island becomes increasingly intriguing as she seeks answers about her past.

Continue reading: Island Review

Wonderfully chameleonic actress Janet McTeer ("The King Is Alive," "Tumbleweeds") gives another of her distinctive and deeply immersed performances in "Songcatcher" as a priggish 1900s music scholar.

A terse, obstinate, overeducated woman who is deeply resentful at having been passed up for a promotion to full professor at her university (in favor of a man), she abandons civilization for a spell to visit her sister (Jane Adams), a teacher at a very remote one-room school in the Appalachian Mountains.

McTeer's intense and austere performance serves the story well as her character makes the discovery of her professional life while reluctantly roughing it with the rustic locals: The isolated society of struggling mountain people has preserved, intact, for hundreds of years the Scots-Irish folk songs carried to the New World by their ancestors.

Continue reading: Songcatcher Review