The Duke (2022)

This movie was perhaps a little too cerebral to watch on a trans-Atlantic flight, but in the end I did enjoy it. The movie is based on a true and slightly odd art caper: the 1961 theft from the National Gallery of a Goya portrait, painted around 1812, of the Duke of Wellington. Jim Broadbent, who is always enjoyable to watch, plays Kempton Bunton, an enlightened working man in Newcastle on Tyme whose detailed and fervent beliefs concerning the rights of the lower classes and the elderly consistently get him fired from whatever job he manages to procure. We see him progress from a cab driver, to pushing loaves about at a bread factory, all the while petitioning for the BBC fee be waived for all viewers. He’s always in trouble, and his much suffering wife, a surprisingly dowdy Helen Mirren, is always both disappointed and exasperated by him. They have a shared loss of their teenaged daughter, which plays a pivotal role in how the whole thing ends up, and it is a quiet movie well worth watching.