A wartime comedy of manners, it's a delightfully whimsical portrait of 1952 England, a time and place of class discord that's both uproarious and politically pointed.

The director gets all the period detail exactly right and there are plenty of historical and cultural references that evoke a sense of nostalgia.

Queen and Country finds exhilarating comedy in places usually reserved for drama, violence, loss.

A little too silly to be taken seriously, yet also too heavy to get all the laughs it very clearly craves, "Queen and Country" at least shows where Boorman's schizoid, if less than wholly satisfying, sense of storytelling comes from.

There's no way around the fact that this is a lesser endeavor than "Hope and Glory," but when it's good, which is often enough, "Queen and Country" glows with a master storyteller's sense of memory.