DVD

Separate Tables (PG) ★★★ began life as a pair of Terence Rattigan plays. Delbert Mann’s 1958 movie stirs them together – and folds in another, the better to smuggle in a couple of Hollywood A-listers. So it is that while the main action revolves around whether David Niven’s disgraced Major might ever get round to asking Deborah Kerr’s neurotic spinster whether she’d like to share a pot of tea, Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth hover in the background waiting to tell of their own travails.

With a cast like that, you expect fireworks. But although Niven won an Oscar, the sparks never fly.

On Chesil Beach (15) ★★, adapted from his own novel by Ian McEwan, has bigger problems than that. While the movie – starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle – is shot to look like a high-end version of

Endeavour, it feels like a low-rent take on The Fast Show. The scene in which Howle is thrashed at tennis by Ronan’s pater (Sam West) is a ‘Competitive Dad’ sketch, while the hotel’s hovering waiters are straight out of a ‘Suit you, sir’ routine.

As for the ending, in which Howle’s character actually ‘explains’ the meaning of his life to us... Has neither McEwan nor director Dominic Cooke heard that stories are meant to show and not tell?

Treat of the week is Spitfire (PG – pictured) ★★★★★, a sizzling documentary about the most famous fighter plane ever.