One Life

In 1938 Nicholas Winton, a London stockbroker, goes to Prague and sees the state of refugee families in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. He makes a list to get children out to Britain, finds visas and host families and raises money. Around 669 children, most of them Jewish, are saved. The film also goes to 1988, where a seventy-nine-year-old Winton still keeps his old scrapbook and comes face to face on television with the people he rescued. James Hawes directed. Anthony Hopkins plays the older Winton and Johnny Flynn the younger, with Helena Bonham Carter as his mother, Lena Olin as his wife Grete and Jonathan Pryce as his colleague Martin Blake. It premiered at Toronto on 9 September 2023 and opened in UK cinemas on 1 January 2024. It took 56.4 million dollars worldwide. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 91 percent from 149 reviews. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian wrote that you would need a heart of stone not to be touched by this extraordinary true story. It won the Cinema for Peace Dove for Most Valuable Film of 2024. There was one controversy: BBC Film's promotional description omitted that the rescued children were predominantly Jewish, and it was corrected after protests. Who it is for: viewers who like true rescue stories and want to watch Hopkins. Who it is not for: anyone put off by an emotional peak set up too plainly. The film moves toward the television scene deliberately and visibly.