Rating: PG | Runtime: 109 minutes
Release Date: January 1st, 2024 (UK) / March 15th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures / Bleecker Street Media
Director(s): James Hawes
Writer(s): Lucinda Coxon & Nick Drake / Barbara Winton (book One Life: The True Story of Sir Nicholas Winton)

Many children grew up thinking that the worst that could happen to them was piano lessons.

When looking back at his work during World War II, stockbroker Nicky Winton (Anthony Hopkins) could only really think about the 250 children that didn’t make it out of Czechoslovakia on the ninth train he organized decades prior. It’s understandable since it’s always easier to focus on one’s regrets than achievements no matter how important the latter prove by comparison. Only upon making the decision to ensure the work wasn’t forgotten would circumstances force him to alter that vantage point. Because while situations outside his control may have prevented those 250 children from surviving the Holocaust, actions that Winton himself put in motion ultimately saved 669 others.

Anyone who knows the story (there was a documentary back in 2011 called Nicky’s Family that saw through the eyes and words of those Nicky saved as well as their children) knows what James Hawes’ One Life is working towards. Yet knowing still won’t stop it from hitting as hard emotionally as it did back in 1988 on an episode of “That’s Life!” Reuniting this hero with the boys and girls he saved is surely centerpiece of his life, so screenwriters Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake have their work cut out for them as far as making the lead-up to its inevitability equally compelling. With help from Barbara Winton’s (Nicky’s daughter) book If It’s Not Impossible …, they reenact both the act and the recognition.

We therefore go back and forth through time. Hopkins plays Nicky in the “present,” tasked by wife Grete (Lena Olin) to clean the house of his charity files and potential donations so there’s room for the impending birth of their first grandchild. Johnny Flynn plays Nicky in the past as his elder counterpart’s quest to find a suitable home for his scrapbook remembers what he did alongside Doreen (Romola Garai) and Trevor (Alex Sharp) in Prague and his own mother (Helena Bonham Carter’s Babi) back home in London. We watch as Winton gains the refugees’ trust to compile children’s names and ages and as turns that catalog into an inventory with which to pitch British families willing to both pay for and foster those who made the long journey to safety.

It’s an important historical record that earns its immortalization through cinema. The result isn’t flashy or wholly unique beyond the content itself (neither was that aforementioned documentary), but Winton’s life is simply too compelling to not captivate regardless. One could argue effective serviceability is exactly what is needed to tell it without distracting from its simple message. Ask Nicky and he’d call himself a simple man who did what anyone should in his place. So, why not deliver his legacy through that same humble lens while allowing his deeds to prove on their own just how special he was. It helps to have actors like Hopkins and Flynn bringing him to life, but the real success comes from Winton himself.

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Anthony Hopkins as Nicholas Winston and Henrietta Garden as Vera Gissing in ONE LIFE; courtesy Bleecker Street.