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Miss World might still go on but it doesn’t go on BBC television and might have been forgotten. And although objectifying people for their looks hasn’t gone away, the idea of selecting women from around the World and parading them in front of judges—like a Meat Market, perhaps, or like Crufts?—seems today like a terrible idea. Even if it was televised in the 80s and was part of growing up in that decade, this film concerns the 1970 contest, which was notable for many reasons, mostly because it was protested by the formative “Women’s Liberation” movement. The film tells the story from their point of view, notably Sally Alexander ( Keira Knightley ). Sally has a daughter from an ex, and at the beginning is being judged by a panel of men because she wants to enrol at a university—and it seems like Oxford or Cambridge. Finally being accepted by the University of London, Sally begins to study history and meets the women who will ultimately form the group with her. However there are ...

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 ...