Mr. Burton

Marc Evans is a Welsh director with a long, unshowy career — My Little Eye, Snow Cake, Hinterland for S4C — and Mr. Burton is the film he was arguably always going to make. It reconstructs the years in which a Port Talbot schoolmaster took a steelworker's son named Richard Jenkins in hand and, by degrees that the film is careful to make unglamorous, turned him into Richard Burton. It opened in the UK in April 2025 and later played on BBC One.

Toby Jones plays Philip Burton as a fastidious, guarded man whose interest in the boy is generous and slightly proprietorial at once, which is a harder note than the material invites. Harry Lawtey, previously best known for Industry, takes the part of the young Jenkins without attempting an impression of the voice that made him famous. Lesley Manville plays the landlady in whose house the arrangement is brokered, and the Welsh-language texture of the town is left intact rather than smoothed for export.

Reviews were strong — a Certified Fresh consensus, and a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film at the 79th awards, with a BAFTA Cymru win for cinematography. What critics kept noting is the restraint: a story about elocution lessons and social class that declines the swelling-strings treatment almost entirely, and is more interested in what the older man wanted out of it than in the career everybody already knows about.