Churchill (2017)

By some reckoning the worst film I have seen in a long, long time. Some plus points for the photography, though it's overemphasised to obscure the small budget, from which you'd get change from a box of popcorn and carton of cola from the Odeon kiosk. When Monty addresses his men before sailing for Normandy, they seem to number only 15. Chartwell (Churchill's home) seems to consist of two box rooms, albeit nicely shot.

This is the sort of film that makes one wish the Germans had won the war, it's that bad. Historically I can't say it's accurate that Churchill didn't want to open a second front against the Germans, and so to base an entire film around that seems like madness. On top of this, he is portrayed as a senile, out-of-touch buffoon who is only fit for a nursing home, who turns up three days before D-day with an alternative invasion plan for Eisenhower. Who laments the imminent loss of life - this would be the same Churchill who led (failed) allied attempts in Norway, Crete, Dieppe, yet you'd imagine from this that the Normandy landings was the first military initiative.

Characterisation is broad, dialogue is asinine.

I don't carry a torch for Churchill, like many great men he had flaws, but this is at such variance with the truth it's basically pornography, except unlike pornography I can't imagine how it could appeal to anyone.

Fmovies: June 1944. The Allied invasion of German-occupied France is due to take place within the next few days. All the plans are set and the operation is ready to go. However, Prime Minister Winston Churchill has grave misgivings for the invasion, fearing that it will be a monumental disaster. He tries to have it stopped, but runs into resistance from the Allied military top brass.

Terrible. Historically inaccurate at every turn. So inaccurate that you figure the writer did no research at all for the screenplay, simply making stuff up as she went along, all for the sake of melodrama. A list of the inaccuracies would run the length of the movie, so are impossible to list in a concise review. Just the thought that Churchill opposed the Normandy landings is bad enough, but that is just the top of the tip of the iceberg.

Even more infuriating is that the movie portrays Churchill as a doddering, indecisive, ignorant, meddling, even senile, old man. An outrageous slander of one of the key figures of the winning of WW2, and one of the greatest figures in history.

Even as a fictional drama, this movie doesn't work. The military side is woefully inaccurate, eg Churchill sending the location of the Allied invasion in a telegram, a Navy officer is part of the 2nd wave of the invasion.

Plus the movie is incredibly repetitive. Churchill gives several monologues about his reasons for opposing the invasion, all saying the same thing. It is just empty melodrama.

Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson deserve a whole lot better than this. Most importantly, Winston Churchill deserves far better than this, and his descendants an apology from the film-makers.

I have seen a lot of bad movies. I've seen a lot of movies that revise history. Never before in my life have I seen a movie that I deemed so atrocious and disgusting that I felt the need to write a user review on IMDb. Until now.

Churchill takes one of this century's greatest men and turns him into a caricature. For all the amazing, courageous, and poetic things Winston Churchill did in his life, this movie makes no mention. Instead, it portrays him as a senile buffoon who fights against the plans for D-Day as nothing more than a bumbling idiot, when in actuality he was one of the leading men trying to get it to take place. He was a hero, not just in Britain but all over the western free world. I imagine there will be a lot of people offended and deeply upset by this portrayal. That's not the sad part, though.

The sad part is that people who do not know actual history will go into this movie and watch it, and come out thinking this was the real man. This movie is a character, reputation, and legacy assassination of one of the greatest men this world has known, flawed as he was. Tell everyone you know that has seen this movie to research him on their own and draw their own conclusions about his life. I implore you. Don't let these awful writers ruin a man's legacy on a whim.

Churchill fmovies. Churchill is depicted as a diminished, drooling buffoon and many who remember him as one of the great names and leaders during WWII will find this movie intolerable. At the end of the film after the credits you see some weaselly disclaimer about how the movie, although based on real people, may or may not have presented events as they really happened.

And so this movie marches on with its hit-piece agenda and the writer should be ashamed to marginalize such a noted figure with such a self-indulgent point of view. Did the writer teleport back in time and hover like Patrick Swayze in a room? Scene after scene shows Churchill as an anxious, alcoholic insecure man with no counterpoints to show him in a leadership role. I'm all for a certain angle for movies and political news shows, but this went too far and came off as an over-reach and simply an ego trip for a script.

Historical accuracy aside, the movie fails in other ways. Besides the cringe-worthy buffoon angle, the music was simply overbearing and not needed in half the scenes. I wish I had brought some noise-canceling headphones to the movie theater. Scene after scene I was praying for just the dialogue to speak for itself without the watery musical underbed to drive it. Scene after scene I was praying for silence. It's as if the music was in love with itself. Well some of us weren't.

John Slattery, who was excellent in Mad Men, was a total miscast. Slattery simply did not have the gravitas to carry the role of Eisenhower.

The movie's only saving grace was Brian Cox, answering the misguided casting call for a needy, spiraling performance of Churchill. He runs away with the role, although an unfair role at that. How much more serving and evergreen it would have been if the character given to him was not so one-sided. But Cox delivers and many of the actors in his scenes simply wither. This would be the time for a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Cox, so blistering was his distressed portrayal of Churchill. Two other actors to hold their own in the movie was Miranda Richardson, who played her role with stoic and steely grace, and the actor who played Smuts, an understated yet praiseworthy performance.

All in all if you care about history, and understand that leaders have both greatness and weakness in decision-making, this movie did not flesh out those layers. Instead it comes off slamming the persona of a historic figure.

'CHURCHILL' was directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and stars Brian Cox, Miranda Richardson and John Slattery. ?Fearful of repeating the invasion of Gallipoli in 1915, Winston Churchill attempts to stop the planned invasion of Normandy in 1944. Only the support of Churchill's wife, Clementine, can halt the prime minister's physical and mental collapse.

I desperately wanted to love this movie. I really did. This is a fascinating period of our history and would have loved to see a great depiction of Churchill's perception of it on our screens for the world to enjoy. Alas, I did not. It's a melodramatic mess that has Brian Cox's unfathomable acting ability keeping it barely alive. The only other positive I can conceive is the splendid speech at the end because the rest of the movie was messy, incoherent and, the worst sin of all, boring.

This movie's structure is were it falters greatly for me. While the plot and point are clear, it doesn't feel like one flowing narrative. The scenes feel messy and out of place(when they aren't) and it overall doesn't appear like much effort went into the creation of the story for this film.

I wouldn't usually do an entire section of a review on the direction but that is the main way this movie falters, at least for me. 90% of the scenes in this movie are shot, acted and scored in the fashion that makes it seem like the fate of the universe rests in these characters words and makes the whole movie stupidly melodramatic. This style works for brief moments in the film but fails overall. A much less dramatic, more relaxed style that still displayed Churchill's eccentric nature would have sufficed but instead they opted for a melodramatic mess,

Brian Cox was honestly great in this movie and I bought every second of his performance. I don't agree that he reaches Oscar levels but I do believe he gets quite close. Miranda Richardson and John Slattery both do fine as Clementine Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower respectively but neither of them come close to Cox's undeniable skill.

The costume and set design for this movie was really good and felt genuine to the era. The cinematography is a very strange subject. On the one hand, it is overly dramatic and feels very weird in scenes that don't require the world to be resting on them. On the other hand, there are a few scenes, like the masterfully written speech, where this format works stupidly well and is very, very effective. So I am pretty torn with this format of cinematography but I feel that it is pretty weak as a whole package.

As good as Cox and the speech are, this movie is probably not worth your time overall. I don't recommend you watch it and I'll rate it a measly 3 Glasses of Scotch out of 10.

This is a shambolic mess of a film with a one-sided view of Churchill, factual inaccuracies and appalling errors. The scriptwriter obviously did not read Field Marshal Alanbrooke's diaries or the many biographies of Churchill.

Even basic military details were so wrong, it is farcical. Couldn't the budget stretch to a military adviser? Monty addressing 20 or so soldiers? He went round addressing brigades, thousands of soldiers at a time.

The way that the characters addressed each other, the salutations, the lack of an equerry for the King, no PPS for Churchill...all utter rubbish.