YMMV / Churchill

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The film does contain some inaccuracies, but one of the main reasons for its poor performance at the box office was simply that it doesn't present the defiant, inspiring Churchill of 1940, familiar from media like Darkest Hour (2017) or Into the Storm (2009), rallying the whole country behind him. This is a worried and anxious Churchill who feels power slipping away from him, and who's temporarily lost his ability to inspire confidence.^note Churchill's most recent biographer Andrew Roberts was particularly apoplectic at what he perceived as the film's lack of accuracy, which is ironic given that one review of his Churchill biography pointed out that it was littered with basic errors of fact.
• Heartwarming Moments: When Churchill's much-abused young secretary Helen Garrett blows up at him about constantly going on about how the D-Day landings will inevitably result in mass allied deaths, because her fiancé is on one of the ships and she needs reassurance, she feels like she's gone too far and says "I'm sorry. I have no right." Churchill realises that his particular failure with her is a microcosm of his general failure to be supportive of the landings, and tells her "No, you have every right," and pulls out her chair so she can sit down, then finally gets on with the Rousing Speech he needs to deliver.
• One-Scene Wonder: One and a bit scenes, actually: James Purefoy as George VI has only two scenes in the film, one very brief one at the beginning and a much longer one later where he persuades Churchill that they can't be personally present at the invasion of Normandy, but it's a miraculous piece of acting, where the soft-spoken, mild-mannered, stammering king talks the gung-ho prime minister down from doing something suicidally foolish.

---