Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

JonathanWalford This film suffers a bit from being a cheap TV movie - historically its a tad rough around the edges and the storyline is predictable and at times even a little dull. The crux of the story is about the strained relationship between a war bride who arrives at a broken down farm in Alberta, the home of her husband's family, in 1943. Her whirlwind courtship, marriage and pregnancy is not met with approval from the Canadian family and although they loosen up towards her, it takes two years to do so. During this time there are many scenes where you just want something more to happen other than whispered snide comments and hate-filled glares. I am not quite sure why this particular story was chosen as the characters don't really engage each other. Brenda Fricker was almost wasted in her role as the husband's mother but even though she was given few lines she still managed to steal most of the scenes! From real accounts I have read, there were jealous and snippy Canadians who felt some of the English war brides were predatory fortune hunters and there were equally as many English war brides who saw Canadians as prudish and uncultured hicks. However, there were far more stories of love and support, and appreciation and adaptability. I know this film needed drama and used a storyline that would provide this but the film would have benefited from some real events relayed from war bride memoirs. I suspect the story was written with little research from period accounts and that's too bad because there is a wealth of material out there that would have made for some great scenes.Regardless, I still think the film needed to be made and I am glad somebody did it. It was overall enjoyable to watch.

max von meyerling How really terrible can a film be, how perfunctory can a period picture be when made by and for people without the slightest idea or even interest in the era beyond some superficial idea of the retro fashion value of certain cultural artifacts. THE WAR BRIDE plays like a Junior High School play. It stands in relation to a real film like the boy's band in THE MUSIC MAN does to a symphony orchestra. It is like a movie about a movie about the war but not a movie about the war. The film is not populated by people but stock notions of stock characters. Let me put it this way: The main character gets pregnant in nine days just to set up a tearful farewell scene. If it's a war film, so goes the logic, we have to have certain scenes and everything is manipulated, even at the peril of logic and history, to get us to some expected cliché scene like finding the toilet with a band on it in the Holiday Inn.Two working girls in the London Blitz of 1940, living and dressing far beyond the means of people at the time, go to a little neighborhood dance which apparently contains a 38 piece dance band very like Glenn Miller which is heard but never seen and which only plays the most acceptable (to today's youth that is) jump tunes, where they meet a couple of Canadian soldiers. The quick gloss, the clothes and the music, are, like the hairstyles, retro cool but really don't reflect the reality of the period. The plot is just twisted in order to present these cool artifacts. There is a farewell scene, the de rigour scene in every war movie since BIRTH OF A NATION and most famously done in THE BIG PARADE (King Vidor). After nine days the soldiers take leave of the girls to go off to the front. What front would that be is the question. After Dunkirk there wasn't much of a front to go off to. Certainly not by truck. They weren't going to drive across the English Channel were they. Forget that the truck they drive off is in US Army markings years before the US entered the war. And we have to have a pregnancy scene, despite everything we know about human biology, the girl announces she's pregnant. As usual everything is manipulated to have these predetermined scenes taken from other war movies. The girls, now married are evacuated, as wives of Canadian soldiers, to Canada. I doubt very much that they would have taken a heavy cruiser across the Atlantic in as much as they might have been better used protecting convoys and sinking the Bismarck etc. I think that the idea was to build a spectacular set of one slight angle of the deck of a ship with a huge gun turret in the background as a suitably dramatic setting. The train journey across Canada is one bad trip. The one room station located in the middle of the forest stands in for both Montreal, Canada's largest city, as well as rural Alberta. All right, it was a low budget picture but a little of what was wasted on the gun turret scene could have at least paid for a glass shot or still insert showing Montreal. When the war bride arrives she is met by her comically dour mother-in law and her crippled daughter. Life will be hard on the farm. I've seen that picture too so if you're still on board at this point please be my guest as you have another hour and a half compilation of stock scenes and stilted reactions. Unbelievable, but even stranger is the reaction of young people who believe this phoney stuff to somehow be authentic.

Tanron88 The War Bride is so heartbreakingly stirring even after multiple viewings -- I go through a pile of hankies in a different spot each time I watch it -- because it's not only the story of one woman's life or even the lives of the 48,000 other British war brides who emigrated to Canada during WWII. The War Bride taps into a collective tale of the North American experience, of the pain and heartache and adventure of the people who came here looking for better lives, and left us, their children, in their wake, to uncover their secret stories.

Tom Murray The War Bride is a beautiful and inspiring drama, beautifully photographed, with superb acting and full of personal growth. Lily, an English girl, marries Charlie, a Canadian WWII soldier from northern Alberta, who lives on a "big ranch on the prairies". That sounds good to Lily but when she is sent to Canada for the duration of the war, the reality is very different. She is stuck with a grieving mother-in-law and a crippled sister-in-law, who feed off each others' bitterness and depression. The ranch is an unproductive farm with run-down buildings. Lily is horrified but decides to make the best of it and does very well indeed. If you like this film, then see Cold Comfort Farm (1995), a similar story and an intelligent comedy.