Forthcoming EVENT - 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood' at Heswall Hall on August 12 at 2pm

Time: 2pm to 4pm

Price: Tickets cost £7 and can be booked by clicking or tapping here.

This movie is as beautiful as its title suggests, and features a prolonged and silent look into the camera and out into the cinema by Tom Hanks that will, I reckon, go down in film history.

It's a story that could easily have descended into unbearable sentimentality, but with a great script by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, a sensitive director, Marielle Heller, and two masterful central performances by Mr Hanks and Matthew Rhys, the result is a moving, amusing and uplifting work of art reminding us that we can still - and must - connect with the small children we once were.

When it was released in 2019 it was described as 'the movie we need right now'. 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood' spoke of kindness, forgiveness, of rejecting adult cynicism, and of childhood and why it should be venerated, protected and nurtured to give all children the chance to imagine - and grow up in - a better world.

It's still that kind of a movie.

Very loosely based on a true story, the plot rotates around two men.

First, Fred Rogers, the American children's television producer and presenter of 'Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood', a charming preschool series that ran, remarkably, from 1968 to 2001 and somehow survived the rise of commercialism.

Second: the jaded and depressed freelance journalist, Lloyd Vogel - who is commissioned to write a profile of Fred Rogers. Lloyd immediately assumes his default position - that his subject must have something to hide and cannot be the television saint of such good character he appears to be.

But, as Mister Rogers explains from the get go - the movie cleverly flicks back and forth in time and intermingles the innocent, make-believe world of his TV neighbourhood with the gritty realities of life - his new friend Lloyd Vogel is in pain. He has been hurt and cannot forgive the person who hurt him.

Mister Rogers explains the meaning of forgiveness, and leaves to visit Lloyd…

And so begins the story.

'A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood' is truly £7 well spent, and the chances are you'll leave Heswall Hall feeling both thoughtful and optimistic.

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