Darkest Hour: Gary Oldman is a tremendous Winston Churchill in high-octane drama

Darkest Hour is a war drama film directed by Joe Wright and written by Anthony McCarten. Set in May 1940, it stars Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill and is an account of his early days as Prime Minister during World War II and the May 1940 War Cabinet Crisis, while Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht swept across Western Europe and threatened to defeat the United Kingdom.

The German advance leads to friction at the highest levels of government between those who would make a peace treaty with Adolf Hitler, and Churchill, who refused. The film also stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn, Stephen Dillane, and Ronald Pickup. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 84% based on 284 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10.

The website’s critical consensus reads, “Darkest Hour is held together by Gary Oldman’s electrifying performance, which brings Winston Churchill to life even when the movie’s narrative falters.” On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, the film has a normalised score of 75 out of 100, based on 50 critics, indicating “generally favourable reviews”. PostTrak reported that over 90% of audience members gave the film a rating of either “excellent” or “very good”.

Oldman was praised for his performance, with numerous critics labelling him a frontrunner to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, an award he would later go on to win. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote: “Get busy engraving Oldman’s name on an Oscar... those fearing that Darkest Hour is nothing but a dull tableau of blowhard stuffed shirts will be relieved to know that they’re in for a lively, provocative historical drama that runs on its own nonstop creative fire.”

David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised Wright’s direction and the musical score, writing: “Unfolding with the clockwork precision of a Broadway play... it’s a deliciously unsubtle testament to the power of words and their infinite capacity to inspire.”