And the Award for Best Prosthetics ...

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2018)

Gary Oldman's take on Winston Churchill is already winning awards and hotly tipped to take this year's Oscar. Brian Cox gave a more thoughtful performance in last year's CHURCHILL, but he didn't win anything. That's showbiz, I guess.
This version looks at the Great Man at the pivotal moment in his career when he replaces Chamberlain as prime minister of a coalition government in 1940, with the British Army facing annihilation at Dunkirk. King George is not keen on Winston (he championed Edward VIII during the Abdication crisis), and he has a 'mortal enemy' in Lord Halifax who thinks he should be leading the country. Churchill's decisions during the First War don't give him a good military track record.
There are many scenes in dingy rooms and corridors in the war bunker beneath St James's Park. Even Buckingham Palace looks a bit dour. The movie's best scene, almost certainly invented, is when Winston takes the Underground from St James's to Westminster (a 90-second journey that here takes six minutes) and finds the people are keener to fight on than the Tory members of his Cabinet. I found myself thinking of Laurence Olivier's deliberately hammy Archie Rice in THE ENTERTAINER.
Kirsten Scott-Thomas is a grander, less motherly Clementine than Miranda Richardson was last year. Lily James is charming as the PM's shy new typist. Everybody plays down against Oldman's shouty interpretation of Winston. His prosthetics deserve an award of their own and he captures the voice and the mannerisms as well as anybody else has, but other actors have given us subtler reincarnations that, unfairly it must be said, failed to attract the Oscar buzz.