We enter the story with a Churchill who is 66-years-old and mostly bedridden. He meets his new secretary Miss Layton (Lily James), who has been hired to type up whatever thoughts he needs to dictate. At the same time, Neville Chamberlin is retiring as prime minister, and King George VI decides to appoint Churchill in his place, a very unpopular decision among Churchill’s own party and Parliament as a whole. Politics and how Parliament works often comes across quite confusingly on screen, and that won’t be changed by simply watching Darkest Hour, but it’s written in a way that you can understand enough to see what Churchill was going through and why he wasn’t as popular in those days as he later became. In that sense, Darkest Hour is not only a companion piece of sorts to Dunkirk, but it also acts as a contrast and counterpoint to the German film Downfall. Very few of Churchill’s colleagues liked him, seeing him as an ‘actor’ who gave these huge overblown speeches and somewhat of a rash warmonger, making a lot of controversial decisions like sending a smaller army troop of 3,000 soldiers to distract the Germans in order to save the 300,000 soldiers stranded on the beach. The screenplay by Anthony McCarten is a stellar example of what can be done within historic fiction, as it’s filled with great scenes between Oldman and Ben Mendelsohn as the King, Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, and the other members of his war cabinet. Wisely, director Joe Wright doesn’t try to recreate the battle of Dunkirk or the rescues – after all, he already did some of that in Atonement, and the filmmakers possibly knew that Nolan was making that movie anyway. At the same time, Wright has been working up to making a film like this ever since directing Atonement, and he finds a way to make such a talkie movie flow quite smoothly with never a dull moment. Even the few questionable moments that are obviously artistic license rather than actual events are done in a way that feels authentic.