Nanny McPhee

I didn’t like it at first, because it was trying so desperately to be charming and classically British, with its Victoriana and very broad caricatures, and it seemed that the morality of the piece would be rather dubious. In the end, though, the adorable kids won me over, especially the boy who’s Hugh Grant’s cousin, who has an amazing ethereally childlike beauty for a boy who turns sixteen in a matter of days. All the performances were strong, given the pantomime dialogue, even from the peripheral characters, and obvious though it was, the payoff at the end was good fun to watch.