Easy to see why Eddy Redmayne won the best actor for this

Rating: 7/10 (25 February 2015)

Well, it is easy to see why Eddy Redmayne won the best actor for this - he absolutely was Steven Hawking. The film really is first class and tells a story of Hawking's life (I say "a story" not "the story") extremely well. As a piece of story-telling it is an example to hold up to other film-makers. It is of course a crowd-pleaser and a tear-jerker, but what is wrong with that - it is what we expected after all. It keeps well clear of the "science" of course - again, to be expected.
The main focus is on his terrible disease and the impact on his marriage. Hawking's attitude to his wife however is shameful and I suspect that the film and indeed her book glosses over some things - after all, who could be critical of a man who has suffered so much?
I watched this film in an excellent VUE cinema with a 4K Sony projector, and the images shot by Benoît Delhomme on the Alexa were beautiful and very subtle. A few close-up shots suffered from poor focus and others from clumsy focus-pulling but in an average cinema I doubt anyone would notice. His colour palette and the colour grading was very clever - quite a bright sunny almost Kodachrome look which contrasted with Steven's terrible disease but fitted with his amazing smile. This is a very good film indeed.