Metacritic reviews

The Last Letter From Your Lover is a pleasant watch, and will charm romance enthusiasts.

Even when the story falters, or becomes astonishingly silly, there’s still plenty to keep you gazing at the surface.

Ultimately The Last Letter From Your Lover is exactly like the beach read from which it was adapted: lavish, breezy, and inconsequential.

Across the film, director Augustine Frizzell balances a dynamic aesthetic energy with a generosity of spirit.

[The] story never fully comes into focus. You catch glimpses of it in between the busy, mechanical lurchings of the plot, in the swirling movement of a camera pan and the ardent commitment of the actors.

In short, it too efficiently glosses over multiple plotlines to have much of an emotional impact. What remains are mostly generic beats. Still, the formula is engrossing enough, and its midcentury vintage appeal — the pillbox hats, headscarves and swanky soirees — is particularly seductive.

At best, it’s a suitable companion piece to the novel; at worst, it’s a lackluster feature bolstered only briefly by flashes of real human emotion.

What the adaptation has going for it is two charismatic young stars, Felicity Jones and Shailene Woodley, pitching in to tell an enjoyable but extremely conventional story.

Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible — and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison.

The central romance here is, on paper, a love for the ages, a story of all-consuming passion. It’s not quite so in practice.