Great acting but a flawed concept

Rating: 6/10 (8 January 2018)

I found the movie a bit slow paced, but then it's supposed to be a drama about Churchill, not a war movie.
What I really found unacceptable was how bumbling they made him look.
Churchill made a lot of mistakes, but he was making huge numbers of critical decisions. They don't show him conferring with generals, and trying to get actions taken, deciding how many planes they could afford to allocate to France and how many they would need to hold back to defend England. It wasn't just Dunkirk, many of his decisions were vital to the war effort. He repeatedly tried to get the French to withdraw and keep fighting, to fight house to house in Paris, to retreat to North Africa and keep fighting. He tasked subordinates to organize the economy for war, to prioritize different kinds of equipment, to organize the home guard.
Churchill was an energetic leader, and was not afraid to make decisions, even knowing that they would result in the death of a lot of people. And he was forced to make such decisions repeatedly. This is a man who had to decide to allow people in Coventry to be bombed rather than give up the secret of Ultra, and he did it.
This movie makes it seem like he was just a drunk who got lucky with one idea, and that is a very unfair depiction.
The acting is fantastic. Gary Oldman is terrific. And individual scenes are fine -- it's only the whole that leaves the wrong impression.