Film

A Town Like Alice

A 1956 epic about a British woman who survives the Japanese occupation of Malaysia and later reconnects with an Australian soldier who sheltered her. It's a sweeping, earnest romance built on wartime trauma and the possibility of healing—less action film than intimate human story scaled to continent-wide proportions. For anyone moved by historical drama that refuses to look away from suffering.

TMDb rating3.2

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love old-fashioned romantic epics where a long wartime ordeal is held together by patience, decency and a slow-building love, the sort of story that trusts you to wait for its emotional payoff.

Skip it if you want a fast, modern pace or a war film with heavy action, since this one spends much of its running time on endurance, waiting and quiet character work rather than battle.

What it asks of you: Settle in for about two hours of unhurried storytelling that moves between hardship and tenderness, with a mid-century stateliness that rewards sustained attention more than quick reactions.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Bridge on the River Kwai1957

Another masterpiece about Allied prisoners under Japanese occupation, but where Lean made action cinema from confinement, he made philosophy from engineering. David Lean at his peak, Alec Guinness unforgettable.

But It's a men's story in a men's world, and it can feel remote—less about survival as experience, more about survival as moral compromise.

The Bridge on the River Kwai poster

Brief Encounter1945

Lean and Coward's jewel: two ordinary people collide briefly in a railway café and change each other forever. Restrained, achingly human, shot through with longing. The spiritual ancestor of what makes Alice work.

But Nothing happens externally. If you need plot momentum, this will feel like watching people drink tea for eighty minutes.

Brief Encounter poster

The English Patient1996

Another sweeping wartime romance that plays love against geography and catastrophe. Minghella's film is lush where Alice is austere, but they share that same architecture: intimacy born from being fractured by history.

But It's baroque and deliberately artificial in a way that can feel airless. Also quite long, and patient in ways some find glacial.

The English Patient poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from A Town Like Alice

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Women in Love1969

Both see wartime fracture and aftermath as the crucible where real love—the kind that changes you—becomes possible. Both trust that private feeling matters as much as historical event.

Ken Russell's adaptation of Lawrence: four people collide during the First World War, and two couples try to make love and meaning in a time of senseless death. Like Alice, it believes that intimacy is both impossible and necessary. Incandescent and unafraid.

But Russell's direction is baroque and sometimes overwrought. The sexuality is frank in ways that will strike some as indulgent or dated, and others as essential.

Women in Love poster
More like this (5)

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence1983

Oshima's unflinching account of a Japanese POW camp and the strange relationship between captor and captive. It has Alice's willingness to sit with moral complexity and its understanding that war damages everyone.

But It's darker and stranger than Alice—deliberately alienating. Some find it overheated, and its famous Bowie-Sakamoto connection feels more famous than the film.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence poster

A Passage to India1984

Lean's final film, set in colonial India: another story about British women navigating a landscape that does not belong to them, and the possibility of connection across an unbridgeable divide. Spectacle in service of intimacy.

But It's measured to the point of slowness, and Lean's romanticism about empire hasn't aged well—you'll feel the politics pulling at the frame.

A Passage to India poster

The Remains of the Day1993

Stevens and Kenton's quiet masterpiece about duty, repression, and the life unlived. Like Alice, it understands that the deepest human stories are the ones we almost don't tell.

But Very interior, very buttoned-up. Anthony Hopkins rarely raises his voice, and if you need emotional catharsis spelled out, this will frustrate you.

The Remains of the Day poster

Atonement2007

Another film about how war fractures a relationship before it can fully form, and how that fracture reverberates across decades. Joe Wright makes it gorgeously, and the structure is ingenious.

But It's deliberately constructed to be unsettling about narrative itself. Some see that as brilliant; others see it as trickery for its own sake.

Atonement poster

Far from the Madding Crowd2015

Carey Mulligan's Bathsheba navigates survival and choice on her own terms. Less about wartime upheaval than Alice, but it has the same patient interest in how people love when they're also trying to live.

But It's quieter than the source deserves, and some of its emotional turns feel underdone. Hardy's novel has more rough edges than this version preserves.

Far from the Madding Crowd poster

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