Many critics thought Julian Barnes much too good to win the Booker Prize, but then he did, a half dozen years ago, with The Sense of an Ending.

Many thought that the book, a very internalised view of memory, would be impossible to turn in to a beautifully textured film, but then playwright Nick Payne, author of the stupendous stage play, Constellations, wrote an adaptation and the acclaimed director of The Lunchbox, Ritesh Batra agreed to be the helmer, and so we have the graceful film, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING.

Here’s a sense of a beginning: Tony Webster leads a reclusive and quiet existence until long buried secrets from his past force him to face the flawed recollections of his younger self, the truth about his first love and the devastating consequences of decisions made a lifetime ago.

The trick for Payne was to craft a script that would make sure that ambiguity was at the heart of the story, the nature of the whole film, the question of memory and history. The past we choose to forget and the nostalgia we each hold in our own lives are the reasons audiences will identify with Tony’s story.

Made with unforced pathos, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING is incisive, gentle and generous, and rounds back somewhat to Julian Barnes’ debut novel, Metroland, a story of clever English school boyhood, but through the fractious prism of memory and nostalgia.

The film has an inherent simplicity, an exactness and delicacy of observation, of nuance and soul. A suitably enigmatic title, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING contains the idea of making sense of an ending, the sense that one’s own life is coming to an end, but at the end of everything there is a new beginning.

Both modest and grand, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING stars Academy Award®-winner Jim Broadbent as Tony, who embodies Barnes’ mastery of middling, muddling, modern man.

Harriet Walter plays his ex wife, Margaret, in a perfectly calibrated performance and Michelle Dockery plays their daughter, Susie, expectant single mother whose nascent maternity maintains a bridge to the here and now as Tony struggles with the then and there.

The inhabitants of the there and then include Emily Mortimer as the enigmatic mother, Mrs Ford, of Tony’s first love, Veronica, and Matthew Goode as an inspiring and influential teacher.

Bridging the there and then to the here and now is Charlotte Rampling as the mature age Veronica, whose confronting present brings Tony’s past into stark conflict.

Thoughtful, thought provoking and thoroughly compelling, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING is the source of a beginning of robust after viewing conversation.