Opening this year’s British Film Festival was the moving if uneven World War Two home front drama, Blitz from 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen. Blitz is at times surprising and quite radical in a way that’s guaranteed to provoke conservatives but in other ways it’s very old fashioned and reminiscent of much-loved childhood adventure stories like The Railway
Read moreOppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the so called ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’, J. Robert Oppenheimer, has for some, been one of the most anticipated films of the year, both for its subject matter and because it’s from one of the most compelling and occasionally perplexing filmmakers of recent times. For the most part, this mix of historical epic and
Read moreBritish drama Operation Mincemeat is the fascinating story of possibly the most remarkable act of espionage and deception in the Second World War. In 1943, the Allied forces were looking to invade Europe through what Churchill had called its ‘soft underbelly’ in Sicily. Unfortunately, Hitler was well aware that the Italian island was a likely avenue of attack. Consequently, an
Read moreThe film Churchill often feels as if director Johnathon Teplitzky and writer Alex von Tunzelmann have taken The King’s Speech and replaced King George the Sixth with Winston Churchill. Both films are about a British leader confronting self-doubt and the crushing responsibility to their people in the dark days of the Second World War. Churchill is not a comprehensive biopic
Read moreBased on the non-fiction book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Monuments Men dramatises the time during World War Two when art critics invaded Germany. Throughout the war, the Nazis had stolen copious art treasures including Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, from galleries and private collections across Europe. For what are purported in
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