Darkest Hour

Joe Wright's Darkest Hour opened in 2017 and won two Academy Awards: Best Actor for Gary Oldman, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling for Kazuhiro Tsuji, whose prosthetic work the central performance depends on. Oldman, then fifty-nine, had spent more than three decades as one of the great underappreciated character actors in English-language cinema, and Churchill finally brought him a major prize.

May 1940. Winston Churchill, just installed as wartime Prime Minister at the head of a coalition government, faces a War Cabinet split between fighting on alone after the fall of France and accepting the peace negotiations with Hitler that Halifax favours. The film covers the four weeks between Churchill's accession and the Battle of Britain in strict chronological order: the parliamentary debates, the Cabinet clashes with Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane) and Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), the early relationship with George VI (Ben Mendelsohn), and the conduct of the Dunkirk evacuation.

Bruno Delbonnel photographs the interiors of Whitehall and Westminster, and the Cabinet War Rooms reconstructed at Ealing Studios, in low light, and the result is a distinctive picture of underground Britain at the war's most precarious moment. Lily James plays Churchill's typist Elizabeth Layton, and Kristin Scott Thomas plays his wife Clementine. It works as biographical drama and as political procedural, and it is also a study of how moral resolve forms under pressure, with Oldman playing the doubt as convincingly as the defiance.