Adapted from Helene Hanff's bestselling account of her dealings with the staff of a London bookshop, this is an absolute delight. Building his film around the letters exchanged between Hanff and manager Frank Doel, director David Jones manages to create utterly credible characters, convey something of the beauty of books and make some telling comparisons between the gloomy reserve of postwar Britain and the effervescence of Cold War America. However, what makes this gentle drama so compelling are the performances of Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, who ingeniously fashion a romance between two people who never met.

When a humorous script-reader in her New York apartment sees an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature for a bookstore in London that does mail order, she begins a very special correspondence and friendship with Frank Doel, the bookseller who works at Marks & Co., 84 Charing Cross Road.