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They were the lost brigade, just a few thousand British soldiers, doomed by a mortified Winston Churchill to fight to the last man to hold up the Germans at the French port of Calais. They courageously did as ordered, sacrificing their futures and lives to delay the advance of Hitler’s armies, buying time for the miracle evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk, just 30 miles up the coast, in May 1940. And at last the heroic stand of the Calais garrison has been widely recognised, figuring prominently in Darkest Hour, the marvellous film starring Gary Oldman that depicts those desperate...

The Winston Churchill biopic Darkest Hour will feed into the debate around the nature of President Donald Trump’s abrasive, confrontational form of leadership, says Joe Wright, the film’s director. Wright suggests that Darkest Hour, which stars Gary Oldman as the British prime minister during arguably the UK’s most testing period of the second world war, is directly relevant to the US’s current political turmoil. “There’s a big question in America at the moment: what does good leadership look like,” says Wright,

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) in a tweet Tuesday compared President Trump to British leader Winston Churchill. Huckabee said he had just been to see the film “The Darkest Hour,” which dramatizes Churchill's experiences as prime minister during World War II, calling it a reminder of “what real leadership looks like.” “Churchill was hated by his own party, opposition party, and press. Feared by King as reckless, and despised for his bluntness,” Huckabee tweeted. “But unlike Neville Chamberlain, he didn't retreat. We had a Chamberlain for 8 yrs; in @realDonaldTrump we have a Churchill.”

In a key episode, Churchill went to the larger Cabinet and won overwhelming approval for his stalwartness. Here, he made his famous statement, “We shall go and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.”  After the war, Churchill wrote of the reaction of his colleagues: “Quite a number seemed to jump up from the table and came running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is...

Best movies: 1. Wonder 2. Dunkirk 3. Darkest Hour 4. The Shape of Water 5. Lady Bird 6. The Big Sick 7. Disaster Artist 8. The LEGO Batman Movie 9. I, Tonya 10. Spiderman: Homecoming Worst movies: 1. Mother (R) 2. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (PG-13) 3. Suburbicon (R) 4. The Dark Tower (PG-13) 5. The Snowman (R) 6. Power Rangers (PG-13) 7. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (PG-13) 8. Snatched (R) 9. Transformers: The Last Knight (PG-13) 10. Downsizing (R)

Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour butchers history to make the British prime minister a much less decisive figure than he actually was. Because an irresolute and small-minded age applies its own neuroses backward to history, because actors love to portray internal torment, and because we fancy ourselves so sophisticated that we know the official story of the past to be a ruse, movies about important historical figures have become less inspiring and “more human,” at times even iconoclastic... Now it’s Churchill’s turn to be shrunken down to a more manageable size. In Darkest Hour, which is set across May and June...

Churchill is an abidingly popular role with big-time actors once the receding hairline and expanding girth of middle-age set in. Sometimes the player is too evidently suited to the part - one thinks of Robert Hardy on telly in the Eighties - and the jowly gravitas gets clanked around as if Winnie wandered Chartwell and Westminster in never-was-so-much-owed mode 24/7. On the literal face of it, the man who brought both Sid Vicious and Commissioner Gordon to the silver screen is one of the least obvious cinematic Winstons ever, and he wears his lavish prosthetics with a very light touch....

Unlike "Dunkirk" it was ALL acting. Coming off the Trump victory the timing of it's release is interesting. Too many not-so-subtile similarities. He's gruff, his own party abandons him, his family keeps him going and he has to deal with a bunch of wusses who are too cowardly to see what's going on. He's alone and he get's his inspiration from the common people he meets on the subway. Theater was pretty much filled-matinee. Upon leaving I observed that most everyone was older. BTW FDR was useless. Chamberlain still thought they could negotiate for peace.

Looks to be a great film.

Video LinkBest video trailer I have ever seen.And, yes, this might be a repeat post.That said, if a movie trailer ever deserved a second post...this is it.Churchill awakened a nation to an existential threat once over 75 years ago. He just might do it again.

The new film "Darkest Hour" offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie "Dunkirk." The story unfolds with the drama of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill assuming power during the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill's predecessor, the sickly Neville Chamberlain, had lost confidence of the English people and the British government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war. Churchill was asked to become prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The armies...

Video LinkThere are a few snippets in Trailer 2 which were not in Trailer 1.This is going to be an incredible film.

Whatever you think about Donald Trump, his main achievement has been to utterly discombobulate his enemies, especially the mainstream media in America. If sometimes we think that the BBC dresses a little too far to the Left, try watching the Washington press pack in full flow. They believe it is their constitutional duty to destroy the democratically elected President by any means possible. He's been accused of racism, sexism and colluding with the Russians to steal the presidential election, which bizarrely they also claim he never wanted to win in the first place. Go figure. Like our own die-hard Remainers,...

Please pardon the vanity. I just saw Darkest Hour. It was really excellent and moving. Both history and drama. Some lines and scenes are obviously fictionalized. The scene with Churchill riding the subway is silly, but I understand the need for dramatic license. It is about the last three weeks of May 1940. Churchill becomes Prime Minister, even though Chamberlain, Halifax, and King George dislike him. Hitler invades France, which becomes a rout. Halifax insists on peace negotiations with Hitler. Churchill wavers, but decides to fight on. It is impossible to say what might have happened if Britain had made...

Trailer to new Churchill movie. Perhaps Sir Winston can once again inspire England.

Words matter. That’s one of the key messages of “Darkest Hour,” in which Gary Oldman embodies — fiercely and memorably — the legendary Winston Churchill, who rallied his country with soaring oratory when Britain’s very survival was at stake. But the same man who uttered such indelible phrases as “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” — and many others — was also a human being, the film argues, with fears and doubts and insecurities and flaws. “Just be yourself,” Churchill’s wife, Clementine (a briskly effective Kristin Scott Thomas) advises him as he heads off, full...

I plan to see it a third time. The other day I went to see DARKEST HOUR, the movie about Winston Churchill’s heroics in the spring of 1940 in steeling the British upper classes to resist Hitler and to relieve Dunkirk by sending off a civilian armada to rescue the British army from the Nazis. The hour was very dark indeed. Aware as you might be of my aversion to movies, allow me to astound you further. This was not the first time I went to see Darkest Hour. It was the second time! I might see it again. The...

The two questions most people ask about a new movie are: Do I really want to see it? And, is it worth the price? "Darkest Hour," the film starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, is definitely worth seeing now, not later. It is worth the price. And it is required. Because in a West under siege, in a West -- particularly the European West -- that often seems lost and almost eager to capitulate to a diminished future, "Darkest Hour" isn't merely a good film. It is a necessary film. It reminds us that heroes don't require magic swords, superpowers,...

Video LinkI haven't seen the movie yet but I am enough of a Churchill and Gary Oldman fan to know this is a winner.I will buy this film when it comes on the market. In the meantime, enjoy and study.

For the first half of this century, during one of the longest active political careers in this country, Winston Churchill was interested and sympathetic to Zionism. Hating tyranny in all its forms, he had reacted strongly against the Tzarist pogroms in the first years of the century and always understood the desperate need of a haven for Jews. “I recognise,” he wrote in a private letter on 2 January 1906, “the supreme attraction to a scattered and persecuted people of a safe and settled home under the flag of tolerance and freedom.” Two years later, on 30 January 1908, he...