Creditable performances, a good plot and just enough Hitler Youth to make you want to see their plans undone.

The film was set in 1939, and played out like a spy drama from that era.

I was with it the whole way and the dramatic final scenes kept me interested.

Glad I saw it.

No CGI superheroes or Hollywood schmalz this very English feel is predictable but nuanced and entertaining nonetheless.

Don't believe the poor reviews; it is not that bad if a bit 39 Steps and the script isn't poor at all. It is understated which is a bit of a disadvantage in these over the top times.

Judi Dench and Eddie Izzard shine.

The soundtrack is excellent

The ending. Is pretty effective. - in these days it's better than most dark offerings.

In "Six Minutes to Midnight", it's the summer of 1939 (so we are in a parallel time-flow here with the events of "The Dig"). A private girl's school - the Augusta Victoria College in Bexhill-on-Sea - is run with loving care by the spinster Miss Rocholl (Judi Dench). But the 'finishing school' is unusual, in that all its teenage students are German. Indeed, they are the offspring of prominent Nazis.

When half-German English teacher Thomas Miller (Eddie Izzard) applies for a suddenly vacant position, he is taken on to share the teaching duties with Rocholl and Ilse (Carla Juri). But in snooping into the activities going on there, he finds mystery and danger.

Positives:

• This is a fascinating premise for a movie that will appeal to an older generation, along the lines of "They don't make them like this anymore". It has elements of the 'good guy on the run' that struck parallels with "The 39 Steps" for me.

• It's great that the school is all based on historical fact. Miss Rochol did indeed run the school, as a part of a plan to infiltrate British high-society with pro-Nazi sympathies ahead of an invasion. In real-life, one of the pupils was the god-daughter of Heinrich Himmler and one - Bettina von Ribbentrop - was the daughter of the German foreign minister.

• After a comic "Family Guy"-style set of production logos to kick off with (for a full one and a half minutes!!),the pre-title sequence is a superb scene-setter. What exactly is going on here? A frantic scrabbling in a bookcase. A pier-end disappearance. The school badge (a genuine reproduction!) with its Union flag and Nazi Swastika insignia. The girls performing a ballet-like ritual on the beach with batons. (This looks to be a cracker, I thought).

• Judi Dench. Superb as always.

• Chris Seager does the cinematography, and impressively so. Most of Seager's CV has been TV work, so it must be delightful to be given the breadth of a cinema screen to capture landscapes like this.

• I like the clever title: "Six Minutes to Midnight". I assumed it was intended solely to reflect the imminence of war. But it actually has another meaning entirely.

• For me, was a highly frustrating film. All of the great credibility and atmosphere it builds up in the first 30 minutes, it then squanders by diving off into sub-Hitchcock spy capers.

• Izzard becomes a 'man on the run', and doesn't seem credible at that. (I appreciate the irony of this statement given that this is the man who ran 32 marathons in 31 days for charity!) But Izzard is built for distance and not for speed, and some of the police chase scenes in the movie strain credibility to breaking point. Another actor might have been able to pull this off better.

• There's a lack of continuity in the film: was it perhaps cut down from a much longer running time? At one point, Miller is a wanted murderer with his face plastered on the front pages. The next, kindly bus driver Charlie (Jim Broadbent) is unaccountably aiding him and Rochol seems to have assumed his innocence in later scenes.

• Various spy caper clichés are mined to extreme - including those old classics 'swerve to avoid bullets'; 'gun shot but different gun'; and 'shot guy seems to live forever'. And there are double-agent 'twists' occurring that are utterly predictable.

• A very specific continuity irritation for me was in an 'aircraft landing' scene. Markers are separated by nine paces (I went back and counted them!) yet a view from a plane shows them a 'runway-width' apart. This might have escaped scrutiny were it shown just once. But no... we have ground shot; air shot; ground shot; air shot..... repeatedly!