Sight and Sound
November 1996
(Sight and Sound featured Another Time, Another Place as one of their top 10 choices of the month from the 63 films on video that they featured in that issue)
"Debut features are often showy affairs. What marks out Radford's first film is it's quietness and understatement. Set in 1944, this is a simple story, lyrically told, of the friendship between a farmer's young wife (Phyliss Logan) and three Italian POWs, recruited to help on the land. Like Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven it captures both the harshness and beauty of life in a small rural community. It is full of exquisitely composed shots of the farmworkers spread out against the fields. "Always rain," sighs one of the Italians on a typical Scottish morning. Radford eloquently hints at both the Italians' yearning for their homeland and frustration which draws the young local women towards them."
"Whoever coined the phrase 'It's grim up north' must have anticipated Michael Radford's 1983 debut feature. Three Italian prisoners of war are sent to an isolated Scottish community, to help with the farming, alienate the war-torn locals and secure a singular friendship of a cattleman's wife (Phyliss Logan, last seen in Secrets and Lies, won the BAFTA Most Outstanding Newcomer to Film and the Evening Standard Best Actress awards for her role) chosen to house them. The mood is dominated by Bermanesque pauses and pans across desolately pretty fields, with waning cellos on the soundtrack and rainfall at any moment, but it's not so much grim as poignant, with Radford's observations and setting unswervingly on the button."
Four Star Rating ('Very Good')
"Set in rural Scotland during the final year of World War Two, the boldly-explored concerns of Michael 'Il Postino' Radford's debut feature (here in edited form) are with desire and desperation, passion and imprisonment. With a classically simple metaphor of liberation constraint at it's heart - the relationship between a trio of Italian POWs and a girl stifling in a barren environment of loveless labour - the film widens its focus on crossed cultures and connections into productive interrogation of both narrative and formal seductions of foreign-ness. Cast, shot and cut with startling effectiveness, and confidently stalked out by Bill Douglas and Bill Forsyth, the film emerges as a generous delight, almost exotically moving."