Film review: The Bookshop

★★★☆☆
Outsiders can often give spicy new slants to British novels — think the Taiwan-born Ang Lee doing Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the American Wilt Stillman tackling the same author in Love and Friendship, or the Dane Thomas Vinterberg directing Far From the Madding Crowd. So it is, up to a point, with Isabel Coixet, the Spanish film-maker who has adapted The Bookshop, the Booker-shortlisted novel of the same name by Penelope Fitzgerald into a film that’s striking, albeit not quite unputdownable.

Coixet (Learning to Drive) gives a dark shot of Castilian melodrama to Fitzgerald’s story about a widow, Florence Green, who after losing her husband tries to heal her wounds by opening a bookshop in the fictional Suffolk seaside town of Hardborough in 1959.…