Goodnight, Mister Tom

Goodnight, Mister Tom (1998) — watch this British television film online on iFILM. Director Jack Gold adapts Michelle Magorian's novel with John Thaw as Tom Oakley, a gruff widower in an English village who reluctantly takes in a London evacuee as the Second World War begins.

William Beach arrives in the autumn of 1939: ten years old, wary, and trained by experience to stay invisible. Tom wants no company. The boy's obvious suffering pulls something loose in him anyway. What follows is not a war film in any conventional sense — the bombing stays elsewhere, and the real conflict is between a closed-off old man and his own long-buried capacity to care for someone.

Thaw picked up a BAFTA for the performance. The film earns its emotional weight without leaning on score or slow motion — it trusts the two lead characters to carry it. Stream Goodnight, Mister Tom online on iFILM.