Movie Review ‘Living’: A Beautifully Painted Film

I love me some films about painfully repressed Englishmen. Fade in on an umbrella-toting, bowler-wearing, pleasure-rejecting, granite-faced member of the starched-underpants brigade, and I’m hooked. Think of a movie about a safecracker: You know the box will get opened, and it’s delicious to wonder how. Oh, and Bill Nighy is my favorite actor. So guess whether I liked Nighy’s new one, in which he plays a rigidly correct Fifties bureaucrat who hasn’t smiled since V.E. Day.

I’d walk eight miles through a swamp of toe fungus to watch Nighy read the weather report, and the actor’s impeccable taste in material does not disappoint in Living, an entry in this year’s (virtual) Sundance Film Festival about a career civil servant’s attempts to embrace life upon learning he has terminal cancer.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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I love me some films about painfully repressed Englishmen. Fade in on an umbrella-toting, bowler-wearing, pleasure-rejecting, granite-faced member of the starched-underpants brigade, and I’m hooked. Think of a movie about a safecracker: You know the box will get opened, and it’s delicious to wonder how. Oh, and Bill Nighy is my favorite actor. So guess whether I liked Nighy’s new one, in which he plays a rigidly correct Fifties bureaucrat who hasn’t smiled since V.E. Day.

I’d walk eight miles through a swamp of toe fungus to watch Nighy read the weather report, and the actor’s impeccable taste in material does not disappoint in Living, an entry in this year’s (virtual) Sundance Film Festival about a career civil servant’s attempts to embrace life upon learning he has terminal cancer.