Can I mention three movies I just saw? The first is “Atonement,” which has been hailed as a masterpiece. It’s not, but it’s good. It takes you on its trip. When a movie does that it’s not nothing.

What didn’t work is you got the sense in watching that the director, Joe Wright, had been so impressed by “The English Patient” and “The Remains of the Day” — by now true classics, and high art — that he kept freezing, and being mannered, and not telling the story but only conveying a mood, or a cinematic style, or an atmosphere. This is too bad because from what I could glean it was a pretty great story. (I haven’t read the book.) But the story got lost, or rather was insufficiently told.

The acting is fine, and in two cases distinguished: James McAvoy as the servant’s son who falls in love and is abused, and Saoirse Ronan as the little girl who abuses him through a powerful lie. But the hinge of the movie, the center of it, is a love story, and we are never really told how the couple came to love each other so deeply, in such a life-changing way, or what their love was for each of them, beyond a mania.

Conveying such things takes time, and a kind of confidence. Wright seemed more interested in showing us how the sunlight dances on the casement window. The movie jumps from the love and the lie to an extended sequence on the evacuation at Dunkirk during World War II, and this is fantastic in both senses — there’s almost