Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022)

The second cinematic outing for the Crawley household arrives in 1928, with a French villa to be inherited, a silent film crew to be accommodated, and a dowager countess to be dispatched with all the solemnity of a state funeral. The enterprise is nostalgic to its bones. It asks nothing of the viewer beyond a comfortable chair and a tolerance for tea being poured in close-up. On the matter of modern social consciousness, the film is a near-total void, and it seems content there.

There is a gay thread, to be fair. Thomas Barrow, the perpetually aggrieved butler, finds a kindred spirit in the Hollywood actor Guy Dexter, who offers him a housekeeping post and, implicitly, a life. It is handled with genuine tenderness, and it is also entirely secondary, a subplot tucked between the roof repairs and the phonograph. The women fare somewhat better. Lady Mary runs the estate and rescues the production, Lady Edith owns a magazine, and Myrna Dalgleish has her career salvaged by a change of accent. All of this unfolds inside a traditional period framework. Nobody marches.

Class relations here are harmonious to the point of fantasy. The staff adore the family. The family adore the staff. When the unpaid extras walk out, the servants cheerfully replace them, and the arrangement is played for warmth. There is no appetite for wealth critique, no racial reckoning, no environmental anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent awakening. The film's only lecture is delivered by Maggie Smith, and it concerns the correct way to behave. This is a very old-fashioned entertainment, and it knows precisely what it is.