Not everyone's going to like this film

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2016)

As well as the three leads, there are two tremendous supporting turns: Guy Pearce is a terrific Edward, the smooth, obnoxious bully who mocks Bertie's stammer and, marooned in Sandringham, yearns for phone sex with Mrs Simpson – what he icily calls "making our own drowsies". Gambon has two great scenes as George V: first as the robust patriarch, barking orders at his quailing son, and then – the sudden decline is a modest coup du cinéma – incapable and on the verge of dementia, mumbling and maundering as his privy councilors make him sign away his executive responsibility.
Not everyone's going to like this film: some may find it excessively royalist and may, understandably, feel that it skates rather too tactfully over Bertie and Elizabeth's initial enthusiasm for appeasement and Neville Chamberlain. In this version, Chamberlain hardly features at all – we appear to pass directly from Stanley Baldwin's resignation to the sudden appearance of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, jowl-quiveringly, sinew-stiffeningly played by Timothy Spall – always giving advice and apparently permitted to wield a lit cigar in the sovereign's presence. But The King's Speech proves there's fizzing life in old-school British period dramas – it's acted and directed with such sweep, verve, darting lightness. George VI's talking cure is gripping.