Downton Abbey: A New Era

Fans of the tv show and earlier film will get the most out of this, with plenty of dangling plot threads deftly picked up and woven into a satisfying series of resolutions. There's plenty of strongly emotional moments here. It plays like one of the Christmas specials but more so, and combines an appropriately high stakes 19th century historical family mystery with an examination of an industry on the cusp of a revolution, as metaphor for Downton and the Crawleys doing their best to survive in a changing world. Hints are given how they will manage it. This is not the place to start with Downton, and the movie assumes wise viewers know that. With so many characters, with so much history, the audience are given not so much introductions as little reminders. As is traditional, Maggie Smith gets most of the best lines, but there are no weak performances. There's even a scattering of wisdom here and there among the drollery and drama.

This film start with a couple marry at the church, and a bunch of people taking photo scene! As turnout, this film is about Robert need to inherit a villa at France, while filming activity occur in Downton Abbey! Entire film full of boring conversation, and annoying overuse scene! Such as, overuse of the walking scene, overuse of the searching scene, overuse of the staring scene, overuse of the arguing scene, overuse of the calling names scene, overuse of the long angle scenery scene, overuse of the drinking scene, overuse of the eating scene, overuse of the dancing scene, overuse of the singing scene, overuse of the riding on the ship scene, overuse of the car driving on the road scene, overuse of the taking photo scene, overuse of the filming scene, and overuse of the kissing scene! Make the film unwatchable! At the end, Violet died! Lucy having her baby at the very end! That's it! Wasting time to watch!

The latest and probably last offering from the Downtown Abbey stable is all over the place. The plot zips along without much jeopardy or character development. Fellows has always been a lazy writer but here Wikipedia dialogue abounds. One section outside a talking picture literally feels like it's word for word google search. The cast is here but David Robb, Jim Carter and all the familiar faces are woefully underused and a sun plot between Andie McDowell and Hugh Bonneville reuses a plot/medical device from the series. It is also dispatched in about two minutes of screen time. This is probably the worst script in a series of bonkers efforts. The charm of downtown is that it feels cosy. It won't push the envelope, a lovely sub plot with Dominic West and Rob James Collier is totally under used and chaste as anything. A missed chance for two very fine performances. All on in all it's a familiar cosy total mess. With a strong piano mess of a score that does nobody any credit.

Yes, gorgeous, a wonderful British cast (who look like they had great fun along the way), and no shoot-outs, car chases, daft monsters, witches, hobgoblins, or nutters running amok, but a great script that skilfully juggles 2 stories, one at Downton, one on the Riviera. There's a wedding, a proposal, a birth, and sadly a death (that won't be a surprise to longterm fans) but it's all wonderfully handled - and a few of the servants show some hitherto hidden talents, as indeed does one of the 'above-stairs' crowd. Just about all the cast gets a moment in the spotlight -- some, quite a few! -- and there are lots of great lines to savour, one of our favourite bits was Maud choosing a straw hat for Carson (wearing a bowler in the extreme Riviera heat!) and the shop assistant referring to "your husband", which he IS of course in real life, but their social strata in the play are miles apart!! {She giggles going out of the shop}. Just a joy to watch, and though at least one reviewer refers to "end of the road", and "dotting Is, crossing Ts", I wouldn't be certain to rule out a further film, after all there are quite a few of the cast who are not that old, and the 1930s as they move towards WW2 could have some interesting stories to tell? Given the absolute joy of watching this one, let's hope they CAN do another one?!

Downton Abbey - A New Era It was great! This was very much a movie for the fans, and it very much felt like the end of road. In the last movie the King's visit provided the central focus of the plot, here we had a less focused shooting a movie at Downton and the family inheriting a French villa. To my mind I enjoyed the movie making but the villa story was quite a bore as it proved to be all a lot about very little. As with any movie that wants to dot the i's and cross the t's at the ending of a franchise it necessarily becomes sentimental and self-indulgent. I think overall this element was handled brilliantly and we had an emotional rollercoaster. I'm giving this a firm 7 outta 10, I'm a major fan so it's probably is a firm 6 lol.

At last a movie made in 2020-2022 that is not full of all the Woke and PC that has befallen so much of British Cinema. A delight. True to its characters and the period as depicted by the original series. Extremely well done.

I had never seen an episode of Downton Abbey before the first film but I loved the film so much I went back and watched the series. This film however falls way short. Its almost like a video advert for Downton, more about the camera work than the film. There is a very weak plot that only seems to be there to enable the scenes they wanted to shoot for the film. The sad thing is the film does have some key moments for Downton but these are almost an after thought not a key part of the story as they should have been. There are some laughs but they are one off moments that just play to the characters you know. I guess for Downton fans its a must see but only because of how invested they are.

I write this as a big fan of the TV series and as someone who enjoyed the first film, I was looking forward to seeing Downton Abbey: A New Era, on the big screen. But I was bored after 20 minutes, and never recovered. The main problem is the fact that there is no real plot; just a couple of story outlines (a movie being made at Downton, and a trip to a villa that Sybbie has inherited in the South of France) which have nothing to do with each other and aren't substantial enough on their own to engage the viewer. The story involving the film being made at Downton generates a few self-referential laughs about having ghastly actors cluttering the place up, but these quickly wear thin. The rest of the comedy comes via the Dowager Countess's traditional brand of classic one-liners, and Myrna Dalgleish's grating voice. One storyline regarding the possible impending death of Cora, which turns out to be a false alarm, renders that entire thread pointless, whilst another storyline suggesting that Lord Grantham's title may be illegitimate is also a false alarm, again pointless. Violet's perfectly timed death doesn't make any sense (how on earth does everyone know that she is about to die?) but at least gives her an opportunity for one more, brilliant line. The settings are as beautiful as ever, the villa in France absolutely stunning. The cast aren't as beautiful as ever, aging much more quickly than the film's timeline should allow. Among the characters there is no tension at all, no strained relationships or politics going on downstairs, nothing at all going on upstairs. It's a shame, because I really think the series has run out of road and this film, as a final encore, could have made so much more of the opportunity it had. A chance to say goodbye to these characters that we have enjoyed for so many years.

Downton Abbey has achieved another goal: it stands on its own in film cinema , as well as in television series production. For those who have followed the series from the beginning will not be disappointed with the latest offering of Downton Abbey "A New Era"! Julian Fellows is a very clever writer . Both upstairs and downstairs. A delightfully charming British drama. Downton Abbey continues to prove that perfection in music composition(The music score in this movie by John Lunn with the Downton theme is sublime) , writing, acting, wardrobe, directing, producing, cinematography, set design, location and casting, and in the finest attention to the minutest detail and period accuracy. If you're a Downton fan there is no way that you can miss this film! It unashamedly pulls at the heart strings as the story takes you on a journey of highs & lows with some unexpected turns.

The title of "Downton Abbey: A New Era" pledges that change has arrived at the Grantham family's mansion after six seasons of television, a previous film and a zeitgeist shift that has caused a chunk of the show's original audience to start regarding its characters' generational wealth with disgust and relish, as though it were a wheel of rotten Stilton. The stately series that began its story with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 has now arrived at the tail end of the 1920s. The choppy waters of modernity are materializing on the horizon. To stay afloat, this amiable sequel decides to ever so slightly democratize itself: The upstairs-downstairs division that has long separated the estate's masters from their servants begins to leak. So does Downton Abbey's roof, which motivates Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to rent the cash-poor estate to a team shooting a silent film - makers of "kin-ema," as Lady Mary's father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), calls it, disdainfully mispronouncing the name of the art form. (The moviemaking plot point may have been inspired by real life: The franchise's shooting location, Highclere Castle, which resembles a vampire bat's underbite, opened its doors to the show after Geordie Herbert, the Eighth Earl of Carnarvon and Queen Elizabeth II's godson, realized that dozens of its rooms were rotting.) Downton Abbey: A New Era takes us back to those familiar faces, but it's clear from the first bars of that gorgeous, rousing theme music that things are a little different this time around. The establishing shots of the house and the surrounding estate make the place seem so stately and grand that I actually gasped when I beheld them. The 2019 film was directed by Michael Engler, who has spent more than 25 years helming episodes of TV shows like My So-Called Life, Sex and the City, and, yes, Downton Abbey. Not, I hasten to add, that there's anything wrong with that. There were some excellent sequences in the first film, especially its dynamic opening scene. But it looked like an episode of television, specifically an extended episode of Downton Abbey., the acting, the emotion of the film was the best I've seen since the first episode of Downton Abbey in 2010. Thank you Maggie Smith.