Cracker of a movie!

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2018)

It is rare that I give a perfect score to any movie, but this one fully deserves it. Indeed, it is so good that I was fully engaged and engrossed throughout and, when the final credits came up, I was rather surprised and actually could have sat another hour quite happily.
Gary Oldman was never on my list of top actors, but he is now. So too is Mendelssohn for his regal portrayal and Scott Thompson for her Clemmie. The young secretary (Miss Layton) also must receive high praise for her carefully composed face, which carried so much emotion and message.
I was also delighted at the humour and humanity. Oldman does Churchillian wit very well indeed and, whether or not it was historical, the unexpected visit by the King was just brilliant. Of course, the subway scene was entirely confected but it made little difference. Wright added it simply to show both the humanity of Churchill as well as, and this is important, the enormous respect the British people held for him.
For the key figure of WWII, possibly the iconic leader of the free world at the time, and certainly one of the most remembered, I was keenly alert to anything in the movie which would degrade or pollute this. Yet both Oldman and Wright portrayed Churchill as cantankerous, quite individually bold, quirky, gentle, witty, alert, decisive, hard-working, and just the leader the Western world needed in that darkest hour.
Casting Oldman as Churchill seemed to me to be like casting Winne the Pooh to play Batman. Yet it worked! Indeed, it worked so wonderfully well that, by the end of the movie, I was IN the Parliament, in Number 10, in the underground War Cabinet rooms and in 1940s Britain so much that the actor Oldman disappeared and the character Churchill emerged in all his bold, cigarish, waistcoated glory.
Brilliant! One for the ages.