★★★★

Six hundred and sixty nine. That’s the number of, mostly Jewish, children Nicholas Winton helped to save from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War. Accounting for the generations since, the total lives in his debt now exceeds six thousand. And yet, until 1988, virtually nobody knew of his effort. Not until it was splashed in the Daily Mirror and on the BBC. It’s that story, as much as the 1939 narrative, at the core of James Hawes’ One Life, which comes adapted from the Barbara Winton penned biography. Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the elder Winton, the one set for an Esther Ransom shaped surprise on the Beeb’s That’s Life. Johnny Flynn is his junior counterpart of some fifty years prior. The film around them is every bit as moving as you’d expect.