The Remains of the Day

In the years after the First World War, James Stevens serves as head butler at Darlington Hall, an English country estate where he has devoted himself fully to the household and to his employer, Lord Darlington. His disciplined routine is disrupted by the arrival of housekeeper Miss Kenton, with whom he develops a close but unacknowledged attachment. The film moves between that period and the mid-1950s, when an American buyer takes over the estate and Stevens recalls the past, including his master's involvement with figures sympathetic to Nazi Germany. The tension between private feeling and duty shapes the story.

James Ivory directed this 1993 adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It followed Howards End (1992) in Ivory's filmography and was produced by Mike Nichols, John Calley and Ismail Merchant. Anthony Hopkins plays Stevens, Emma Thompson plays Miss Kenton, and James Fox plays Lord Darlington; Christopher Reeve, Hugh Grant and Peter Vaughan also appear.

The film has a strong reputation among critics, with a critics' rating of 8.5/10 from 48 reviews, while audiences on TMDB rate it 7.4/10 from around 1,550 votes. On IMDb, the feature holds an audience score of 8.0/10 from roughly 90,000 ratings. Made for about 12 million dollars, it returned 23 million dollars worldwide.