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The last successful entry in the category of classic British Christmas movie has to be Love Actually, and in common with that film and many other classics of the genre is a mixture of light and shade. This is the sort of thing that many find off-putting: because it’s hard to believe that people who look like Emelia Clarke can be unhappy with their lives, although of course this is nonsense. Her quirkiness has led to some ludicrous comparisons with Fleabag, but the trick to this film is to see it as a bit of Christmas fun. It’s based on the music of Wham! and George Michael, and was developed with the performer’s blessing. There are also some similarities with the Proverbially Great Christmas film It’s A Wonderful Life. It’s about a young George Michael-loving woman who doesn’t have her life together a year after being very unwell. Kate (Clarke) has taken a job at a Christmas shop in Covent Garden—a shop that functions all year round  because its manager (Michelle Yeoh...

This film comes to London with the accompanying news item that, when the script was originally touted around in the 1990s, producers wanted the famed and revered former turned liberator, to be played by Julia Roberts. What sounds like absurd clickbait nonsense is true, and an indication of what the movie business can be like, and also how 12 Years A Slave proved that audiences will go and watch a film about slavery. This film, starring London-born Cynthia Erivo as Tubman, is a lengthy and quite harrowing look at the era. It’s not as violent as 12 Years A Slave although the violence is seen in evidence on the faces and the bodies of the slaves. It’s a companion to that film, and would also pair well with Spielberg’s biopic of Abraham Lincoln. The real Harriet Tubman Tubman is born into slavery but marries free man John Tubman. But when her slave owner dies and she and others are to be sold off, Tubman decides to make her escape. The beginning of the film is a fairly slow-g...

Ron Howard’s Rush , about James Hunt’s single Formula 1 victory against his rival Niki Lauda was a peerless cinematic portrayals of rivalry on the road. This excellent film, which is also—perhaps better —known as Ford v. Ferrari, tells the story of two men and two motor companies: Ferrari, full of Italian pride in engineering, and Ford: the giant company that pioneered the American automobile and was not as good as it used to be. Nobody ever thought they could create a sports car, but this film dramatises how they did. It’s also the story of two men: Carroll Shelby ( Matt Damon ), the racer with a heart condition that means he has to get in the workshop and put the cars together; and Ken Miles ( Christian Bale ), the irascible Brummie driver whose knowledge of the entire car and the processes required to drive fast. The two men don’t start well, and their fiery relationship is the only fire that subsides as the story continues, with respect and friendship. The film is a lon...

The pursuit of Victorian science makes for great entertainment, and this film has its quota of well-to-do men in waistcoats tutting through their massive facial hair at the prospect of some scientific innovation. James Glaisher’s work with air balloons proved that the atmosphere had different levels, and he was a pioneer of forecasting the weather. This film removes his aeronaut partner Henry Coxwell and replaces him with a lady, Amelia Rennes, who is more of a fairground pilot—very much the showman to Glaisher’s studious scientist. This is not a big problem as Amelia represents a composite of several lady balloon pioneers of the time. Glaisher and Rennes are played by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, reunited after portraying Stephen and Jane Hawking a few years ago. Amelia Rennes is very much the focus of the early part of the film: there are flashbacks to an unhappy time in her life, and anxiety makes her a little too unreliable for Glaisher. However the two get into a ...

Katharine Gun was a translator/analyst at GCHQ in Cheltenham in 2003 when the United States and Great Britain were trying to get a UN Resolution to attack Iraq. She was presented with evidence of this pretext (that was declared legal very late in the game in Britain) and decided to leak it. When the authorities clamped down on everyone in her department, she chose to put her personal wellbeing behind the moral opposition to an unjust war, and she confessed. You might remember Tony Blair’s “calculus of risk”: well Katharine Gun made a similar but ultimately very different decision. This superb film about Gun, who is played by Keira Knightley in by far her best performance to date, should be a required watch for everyone. It’s tricky to separate the original context from this dramatic retelling, but it’s a film that should be seen with The Post   and All The President’s Men and any film that concerns itself with the real life struggle between an individual and the system ...