The King's Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010)

As with Kate Winslet's self-fulfilling quip about needing a Holocaust part to bag herself an Oscar, stuffing a biopic of a British monarch chock-full of heavyweights is also a rather dependable route to Academy Awards success, and so it proved.
But in this case, it was also deserved, Colin Firth's plaudit in particular. Whilst, being constrained by the closeted milieu of the royal universe, it contains little to address wider human concerns, and also surely taking great liberties with the facts behind closed doors for comic and empathetic effect, it really does engage. Firth as the King-to-be mortifyingly crippled by his stammer and Geoffrey Rush as his irreverent Australian speech therapist are enormous fun to watch in their verbal jousting, and the director knows just when to lay off before this goes overboard to switch seamlessly to a confessional, intimate tone in a portrait of a man imprisoned by birthright and expectation.
Of course, it's all heading towards a triumphalist climax, and the benefit of historical hindsight hardly makes this a spoiler, but it's still curiously poignant when it arrives.

7/10