6.5/10. Builds to a powerful climax from a rather ropey start — continually improving largely thanks to an excellent performance by Winslet. It would have been even better but for a script that occasionally slews into bathos (perhaps the fault of the original book which is rather old) and a very weak performance by DiCaprio. (As time goes by, it becomes increasingly apparent that he, like Tom Cruise, is not an actor. He possesses only a limited repertoire of facial expressions and modes of speech which are trotted out performance after performance have in the process becoming both predictable and monotonous).
It was also a shame that the final two minutes weren’t cut so that the film ended on DiCaprio’s twilight running. This marks such a natural endpoint that I even wonder whether the final 2 minutes were tacked on at studio insistence to soften what would otherwise have been a rather harsh ending — but one which would have been all the more powerful for that.
