Critics reviews

Writer/director Jessica Swale tries to make a case for Alice’s selfishness being tied into women’s oppression, but I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Arterton is a wonderful actor, when not constrained by picture-book settings and prickly-spinster clichés. And an ending so contrived it will blow your mind.

Swale, who also wrote the screenplay, lets these picturesque qualities carry the movie, occasionally deploying twinkly music and slow-mo to tell us that what we are looking at is as pretty as it seems.

Summerland does a maddening double Dutch between cliché-laden genre modes.