‘Their Finest’ Review: British Screenwriters Keep Calm and Carry On in Stirring WWII Tale

Any film that celebrates the greatness of the movies (and the plucky souls who make them) risks getting lumped together with such recent hooray-for-Hollywood awards-bait as “The Artist,” “Argo” and “La La Land,” but “Their Finest” goes in another direction entirely, demonstrating how Britain’s wartime cinematic output was used to rally support for the war (at home and abroad) while never shying away from the loss, horror and heartbreak that every war creates.

For many, it means jobs in munitions factories, but for Catrin, her skill at sloganeering has gotten her a new gig at the British Ministry of Information, writing female dialogue — which her colleague Tom (Sam Claflin) refers to as “the slop” — for propaganda films.

A newspaper clipping sends Catrin after a story that she thinks will make perfect fodder: twin sisters who took their fishing boat to Dunkirk to bring soldiers back to the U.K.

Before long, Catrin’s script has attracted the attention of the War Department (run by Jeremy Irons, who regales the writers with a wonderfully hammy rendition of the St. Crispin’s Day speech); her movie might help nudge the United States into the war, which means they get to shoot it in color — and they have to find a role for the hopelessly untalented, but toothily photogenic, Yank war hero Carl Lundbeck (Jake Lacy).

Catrin constantly labors to make her movie better than it needs to be, and that effort comes through in the scenes we see; we’re allowed to laugh at the conventions of propaganda filmmaking — and the movie-within-the-movie gets the vagaries of 1940s Technicolor just right — but at the same time we’re stirred by the sacrifices and the strength on display.