One Life (now streaming on Paramount+) is proof that the presence of Sir Anthony Hopkins always and without fail elevates a movie. (OK, maybe not that one Transformers movie, but at least his scenes were memorably unintentionally hilarious.) This film is more stereotypical of what we’d expect from the veteran Oscar winner, who plays the older version of real-life British gent Nicholas Winton, whose efforts to extract hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia made him an unsung hero of World War II. Johnny Flynn (Stardust) plays the younger version of Winton as the film jumps between the late 1930s and 1987 – but as you’d expect, Hopkins is the one who truly carries the movie.

ONE LIFE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nicholas (Hopkins) has too much stuff. Boxes and boxes of it, piled up here and there, in the den, in the garage. He’s 80-ish, and he takes it slow around their nice, spacious house, but he still drives and still dives into the pool in their lovely back garden. His wife Grete (Lena Olin) insists it’s time to get rid of some of that stuff – but they’ll find a special place for that one attache he keeps in the drawer, she promises. It’s the kind of attache that’s ripe to trigger a flashback: Young Nicholas (Flynn) visiting Prague in 1938. He visits a refugee camp where children clamor for the bit of chocolate in his pocket. A sweet girl, in spite of the harsh conditions and the dirt on her face and hands, smiles wide and shows the gap where her two front teeth are about to grow in. A 12-year-old girl looks considerably more haunted, holding a baby that isn’t her sibling or cousin but one that belongs to people who are just, well, no longer there. 

The Nazis have already pushed these people from their homes, and are on the brink of invading Prague. Something must be done about this, Nicholas insists. He can’t just return to London and resume his job as a stockbroker. He wires his boss and says he’ll be back whenever, and gets to work, recruiting humanitarians Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) to come up with a plan to extract the children to the U.K. Nicholas goes home and gets his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) to help him drum up money, visas and foster families. He pleads with British bureaucrats to be, well, less damn bureaucratic, and they put the kids’ paperwork to the top of the pile. 

Letters are written. Photos are taken. Money is raised. Promissories are penned. Typewriters go tickity-tack. Phones ring. Children say heartbreaking goodbyes to their parents as they board trains to safety. Meanwhile, in 1987, Nicholas contemplates. That is to say, he stares longingly into the distance, in between cleaning jaunts (he piles up boxes of old paperwork and burns them in the yard). He opens the attache and pulls out a scrapbook full of photos and documentation. There’s no pride or nostalgia on his face. Just – blankness? An unwillingness to open old wounds, perhaps? He takes the attache to a newspaper, and the doltish editor sends him away. This is Nicholas’ legacy. And he doesn’t know what to do with it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s some very clear parallels to Schindler’s List here.

Performance Worth Watching: Without Hopkins’ haunted nonverbal performance, One Life would be incredibly ordinary.

Memorable Dialogue: Nicholas states it plainly at the refugee camp: “I have seen this, and I cannot unsee it. And because I may be able to do something about it, I must at least try.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: One Life is a character study cloaked in the trappings of a historical drama – and thank the cinema gods it sidesteps most of the trappings of the staid biopic. The finely shot, relatively bare-bones 1930s sequences lay the groundwork for Hopkins to silently and existentially ruminate in 1987, where Nicholas very pragmatically clean-sweeps the clutter from his life and ends up finding a bit of emotional clarity in that precious briefcase. Director James Hawes shows an eye for the usual period detail, but more crucially, executes the narrative with a sense of urgency, maintaining tension as the Nazi invasion looms and using montages effectively to convey significant amounts of visual information while Lucia Zucchetti edits crisply, sharply and with clear intent. This is not at all the talky foot-dragger of a drama you may expect it to be.

Hopkins’ scenes are where the film finds its true agency, a complexity beyond the easy and simple assertions of his character’s selflessness. It’s obvious that Nicholas deserves recognition, but he may not feel quite the same. And so the actor, furrowing his brow, stirs all manner of intangibles into the screen version of Nicholas: The specter of aging, feelings of unworthiness, long-faded memories vividly returning. On top of all that, and more visibly spelled out by the screenplay, is nagging regret: Did I do enough? That notion leads to an inevitable tearjerker conclusion, one that feels less egregious after Hopkins put in all that work. This is precisely why he’s a master of the craft.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hopkins’ thoughtful artistry, coupled with Hawes’ technical proficiency, renders One Life a thoughtful and memorable drama.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

How is it possible that Borderlands, a new action blockbuster based off one of the best-selling video games of all time, will continue its legacy as of one of cinema’s greatest disappointments?

That reality is the saddest part watching the new Borderlands movie, now stupefying and nauseating audiences everywhere. What should be a fun, sci-fi summer romp is instead a total misfire from nearly every department.

For those unfamiliar, the Borderlands games feature a set of ragtag outlaws across dystopian planets across space, often searching for treasure and space-like creatures. This film version loosely follows the main plot of the first game, first released back in 2009.

That premise though, of a rescue mission gone wrong on a dangerous, desert planet, is here obliterated in an awful screenplay that feels like a half-hearted rip-off of Mad Max and Guardians of the Galaxy (another big summer hit that, strangely, first premiered almost ten years ago to the day.)

Borderlands’ script is atrocious, filled with unspecific nonsense at best and cruelty and crudeness at worst. The plot is derivative and simple. The technical design is unfinished and grotesque, with no clear theme or purpose. The editing and direction is confusing, and most of the cast looks bored and anxious on screen.

Even worse is the film’s sense of humour, seemingly insulting the PG-audience of teenage boys by stuffing every scene with as much unfunny toilet humour is possible. The jokes are consistently crass and gross – sometimes downright revolting – and each is worse than the one before it.

Some of the more tasteful zingers, for example, include quips like, “You’re a bunch of poopy mouth faces who can eat your own butts!”, or, “I didn’t know electrocution caused defecation!”, complete with the matching visuals.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, somehow the film’s $110 million budget didn’t include enough to finish rendering or animating the film’s special effects, which often have the composure and detail of a half-finished high school project. I haven’t seen effects this sloppy since 2019’s Cats…which famously went on to win Worst Picture that year.

Having an unpolished final product in the modern movie landscape is unacceptable when it’s a large studio project like here at Lionsgate, especially when the competition (like Universal and Warner Bros.) have cutting edge effects in every major film with ease. An unfinished or rushed movie is just lazy. The effects are so poorly rendered the 15-year old original Playstation 3 video game looks better than this.

Yet the worst sin is how all of the characters in the cast are endlessly nasty and unlikable, with almost no redeeming character traits. These are bitter, cynical characters with no counter balance that makes the audience want to root for them.

Not only is this a betrayal of their more gripping, gritty personalities in the source material, but it gives talented actors in the cast nothing meaningful to work with, leaving them to flounder with shallow, clunky dialogue and comedy dripping with corporate synergy.

I almost feel bad for the genuinely talented performers like Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee Curtis whose skills as storytellers and comedians are being wasted, especially with designs and relationships that are being misdirected as a clear knock-off to better science fiction movies of the last decade.

Blanchett, for what it’s worth, is still fully committed to the character however unpleasant she is. Her performance, along with a few others (like a great Janina Gavankar as Commander Knox) are truly the sole enjoyable elements of this mess.

Video games movies have a (perhaps unfair) reputation in the last 40 years of having disingenuous Hollywood adaptations often misunderstanding the tones that made the franchises and characters popular in the first place. It’s possible to get the adaptation right – look at the recent success of The Last of Us on television.

But not Borderlands. Director Eli Roth has completely misunderstood what makes summer blockbusters entertaining or why the games were such a big hit in the first place. His tone is so off-putting that the whole film feels boring and hollow.

I’ve been reviewing movies for more than a decade, and I genuinely can’t remember the last time I disliked the experience of watching a movie this much. For anyone going out to the cinema for a good time, that’s a borderline disgrace.

1 out of 10

Rated PG, 1hr 42mins. Sci-Fi Action Adventure.

Co-written and directed by Eli Roth.

Starring Cate Blanchett, Ariana Greenblatt, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu, Jack Black and Edgar Ramírez.

Now playing at https://www.cineplex.com/theatre/silvercity-burlington-cinemas.

As another terrifyingly significant presidential election nears, it’s hard not to fantasize about how different things could be. Imagine, for instance, having a president who put deeply held values above the pressures of their biggest donors. Imagine one who was able to truly listen and learn when faced with issues they didn’t understand rather than adhere to whatever stance happened to be the most politically convenient at the time. Imagine, even, a president who inspired you, who made you feel a glow of patriotism, skeptical as you might be of the concept. In short, imagine Josiah Edward “Jed” Bartlet, president of the United States as envisioned by Aaron Sorkin and brought to life by Martin Sheen across seven seasons of the award-winning and critically acclaimed NBC series “The West Wing.”

Two of the show’s cast members, Melissa Fitzgerald (who played Carol Fitzpatrick, assistant to the White House press secretary) and Mary McCormack (who played deputy national security advisor Kate Harper), certainly still believe in the show’s sticking power as well as its overall positive framing of politics. They have written a book about it that is plainly geared toward existing fans of the show: “What’s Next: A Backstage Pass to the West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service.”

Look, it’s true: Every so often, I make hot chocolate in my “Bartlet for America” mug and sip it wistfully, imagining a world in which we’d had a President Bartlet instead of a second President Bush, perhaps followed by a President Santos — the character played by Jimmy Smits who had sweeping, truly inspired education reform plans. It’s a lovely dream, a White House that’s more “West Wing” and less “Veep,” functional and nearly scandal-free, earnestly dedicated to bettering the lives of everyday Americans by doing the slow yet essential work of policy change.

Yes, I know this is extremely naive; yes, I’m aware that Bartlet was problematic in plenty of ways, as were his staffers; and yes, I know that “The West Wing” was, in many ways, a liberal fever dream that bought into American exceptionalism and the ideals of patriotism. But that’s just it: The show was a fantasy, one that gestured at an idea of how things could be, but that wasn’t trying to claim that this was how things really were. Sorkin himself insisted that “first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. ‘The West Wing’ isn’t meant to be good for you. … Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we’ve asked for your attention.”

And entertain us it did, across more than 150 episodes, some more memorable than others, but all including at least one rousing monologue that made this viewer, at least, believe in the possibility of a government that really works, or that really tries to work, or that really wants to work. It helps that I first watched bits of it as a tween, long before I’d moved to the States, when my trips to California were strictly family visits during which I was loved and spoiled by my grandparents and aunts with as much frozen yogurt as I wanted, unrestricted TV time during which I enjoyed more channels than I knew what to do with and endlessly fascinating commercials for toys I would never get, and best of all, bookstores so large I could get lost in them. It felt like a more innocent time.

But, of course, it wasn’t. “The West Wing” was airing as George W. Bush took office following a close and contested election. It was on TV when 9/11 happened, as the Patriot Act was signed, and as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were launched. The show offered a rosy alternative, which appealed especially to a certain income bracket; its biggest chunk of viewers, according to a 2001 study, were earning more than $70,000 a year — or, in today’s money, more than $120,000. Largely sheltered from systemic injustices contributing to and caused by poverty, affluent people experienced fewer of our government’s shortcomings and probably found the show’s vision more plausible than it was.

As a (rather sheepish) devotee of the show, I bought into it too, especially the first couple of times I watched it front to back, in my late teens and early 20s. It managed to make the American political process — which I found deeply baffling, having never learned how it worked in school — exciting. Partially, I’m sure, it was the speed of the quippy dialogue, which Sorkin is famous for, as well as the way the show was shot, its long walk-and-talk scenes lending a sense of urgency to matters of dry policy. The humor was helpful too, and sometimes educational. I’ll never forget the Big Block of Cheese Day episode during which deputy communications director Sam Seaborn is required to meet with a ufologist — and Press Secretary C.J. Cregg and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman learn (along with the rest of us) that the maps we’ve all grown up with are both imperialistic and frankly just wrong.

But as funny and inspiring (often at the same time, as in the brilliant two-parter “20 Hours in America”) as the show can be, there are glaring issues in it. When I rewatched it more recently, I was incredibly disturbed, for instance, by the dynamic between Lyman and his assistant, Donna Moss. What was framed as a cute “will they/won’t they” relationship between boss and devoted employee now read to me as not only extremely unprofessional but even downright abusive, with Donna bearing the brunt of Josh’s temper tantrums and putting up with being constantly belittled by him. But it’s more than the interpersonal dynamics; the show’s occasionally over-the-top optimism and sincere belief in the United States as the greatest nation on Earth — not to mention its very white casting and casual yet consistent sexism — has, speaking anecdotally, made it feel cringey to many leftists of my generation.

The old critiques about the show’s idealism still ring true. Cynicism about and frustration with the slow gears of government have likely always existed throughout the left-right spectrum. Now, with social media adding a second-by-second commentary on an already speedy 24-hour news cycle, these sentiments feel much louder and more visible.

The authors of “What’s Next” don’t address the ways the show has aged poorly. They’re instead relentless in pointing to its positives, and to be fair, when it was originally airing there was no other TV show depicting government functions, and so the policies that “The West Wing” explored were likely eye-opening to many of its viewers. An episode in the first season, for instance, includes a compelling argument for financial reparations for the descendants of enslaved Black people, a concept as old as abolition but which plenty of the show’s viewers might have never encountered before.

This particular example isn’t mentioned in the book, though, which focuses instead on the broad idea of service and lionizes the show’s cast members for their various social and political activism. Many have worked to support veterans and treatment courts, which emphasize rehabilitation for individuals with substance use disorders. “What’s Next” is a cheerleading text, a fun and breezy read that doesn’t delve into any cringe aspects or difficulties on set.

But “The West Wing” would, like almost any piece of enduring media, only suffer from an insistence that it’s perfect. The show is a messy piece of very entertaining — and occasionally educational — television, full of extremely talented actors giving incredible performances, but it’s not a road map for reality, nor should it be.

After President Biden’s debate debacle this summer, the show’s creator, Sorkin, penned a bizarre op-ed suggesting that the Democrats nominate Mitt Romney, a moderate Republican, for president, a strategy to poach enough conservative voters to keep former President Trump from regaining power. But when Biden stepped out of the race, Sorkin quickly took back the suggestion. His op-ed was, depending on whom you asked, a frustrating or entertaining thought experiment, but it should never have been seen as real advice for the real world. Like “The West Wing,” it was a break from reality.

Ilana Masad is a books and culture critic and author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.”