Hanky, please, for the humanitarian the U.K. press dubbed the “British Schindler.”

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2024

A less-than-extraordinary film that is nevertheless heartwarming.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 16, 2024

“One Life” is a slow burn, slowly establishing Winton’s modest character as a younger and older man, but when it cracks open, it is a deeply moving portrait of true human goodness.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 15, 2024

As we continue to grapple with today’s issues of war, refugee crisis and growing antisemitism, the film’s relevance is so troubling that you cannot fail to be moved by it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 15, 2024

The emotional payoff takes a while to arrive, but once it does in the last act of this film, you’ll have a hard time forgetting Hopkins’ face.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 14, 2024

In trying to capture this almost stoic modesty, the film, directed by James Hawes, falls into a dramaturgical trap.

| Mar 14, 2024

A maudlin and middling historical biopic...

| Mar 14, 2024

It certainly left me sobbing, and that’s a credit to Hopkins’ impeccable performance as well as Hawes’ sure-handed, straightforward direction.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 13, 2024

The film is quite gripping in its attention to the bureaucratic hurdles and mind-boggling logistics that Nicky and soon his mother (Bonham Carter), a German-Jewish refugee herself, must surmount to start moving children to safety.

| Mar 13, 2024

“One Life” tells a story that needed to be told and tells it impeccably.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 13, 2024

One Life is a perfectly respectable entree in the feel-good Holocaust genre. The existence of this genre, though, feels more and more obscene.

| Mar 11, 2024

Nicholas Winton’s heroics were astonishing, but One Life does the “British Schindler” a disservice by reducing them to the stuff of facts and figures, which is galling given how readily they call out for more feeling and depth.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 9, 2024

A somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 9, 2024

It’s just too predictably on the nose with its writing, and manipulative in its storytelling, to earn a place in the top tier of second world war movies.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 7, 2024

It’s fine, in its workmanlike way. But the story is so inherently powerful and moving and there is so much goodness and decency at work it will set you off. Take a whole box of tissues if you want to play it safe and would rather not deploy your sleeve.

| Jan 4, 2024

One Life breaks no new cinematic ground. But it tells a story worth hearing. And it allows an indisputable great one more chance to show us what he can do.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 3, 2024

Protect Anthony Hopkins at all costs.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 31, 2023

This is a straightforward biographical drama and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it’s enough just to show what happened. It’s elevated by the strong performances and by the skilful juxtaposition of the two timelines.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 29, 2023

Garai is especially good as the heroic Doreen, who stays on in the city long after the Nazis’ arrival, but it’s Hopkins who anchors the film’s emotional centre with his slow burn of a performance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 29, 2023

The central facts of Winton’s story are so moving, and where this telling ends is so powerful that any misgivings about the film’s style vanish.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2023