As with Deep Impact and Armageddon, White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen there are to be two films released in 2017 focusing on Winston Churchill. Joe Wright is following up his gaze into the Black Mirror with Darkest Hour, which looks at the fight against Hitler in the early days of World War II. An almost unrecognisable Gary Oldman is our Churchill in Wright’s film, alongside Lily James, Rogue One’s Ben Mendelsohn and the late John Hurt in his last filmed role.
Lionsgate have Brian Cox as their Prime Minister in the new film from The Railway Man director Jonathan Teplitzky. Unambiguously titled Churchill, the film sees Cox lead a cast which includes Miranda Richardson, John Slattery, Ella Purnell, Richard Durden, Julian Wadham and James Purefoy.
In contrast to Darkest Hour this take on Churchill’s life finds its feet on the days approaching the D-Day landings. Plagued by doubts and in-fighting the film looks to the relationship between Churchill and his wife Clementine (Richardson) whose unshakable companionship looks to be the human heart in the unstoppable machinery of history.
Churchill is released in UK cinemas on the 16th of June. Here’s the new trailer.
Churchill Movie Trailer
Churchill Movie Synopsis
June 1944. Allied Forces stand on the brink: a million soldiers are secretly assembled on the south coast of Britain, poised to invade Nazi-occupied Europe. One man stands in their way: Winston Churchill. Fearful of repeating, on his disastrous command, the mass slaughter of 1915, when over 500,000 soldiers were killed on the beaches of Gallipoli. Exhausted by years of war and plagued by depression, Churchill is a shadow of the hero who has resisted Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. Should the D-Day landings fail, he is terrified he’ll be remembered as the architect of carnage. Only the unflinching support of Churchill’s brilliant, unflappable wife Clementine can halt the Prime Minister’s physical and mental collapse.
