The Duke
Director: Roger Michell

This film belongs to a long tradition of British cinema that celebrates the loveable eccentric, the little man fighting unreasonable bureaucracy and speaking truth to power. The Duke is based on a true story about an improbably named Newcastle taxi driver, Kempton Bunton, and the notorious theft of Francisco de Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London in 1961. It is also, sadly, the last movie by director Roger Michell – his work ranged from the TV dramatisation of The Buddha of Suburbia to Notting Hill – who died last September aged 65.

Bunton is played by Jim Broadbent (inset) with a convincing mix of guile, wit, stubbornness and sadness, and shows how infuriating it must be to live with someone intent upon a righteous crusade. Bunton is a failed dramatist who doggedly sends scripts with titles such as “The Adventures of Susan Christ” to the BBC. He campaigns with equal tenacity for free TV licences for the elderly, and is prepared not only to go to prison for non-payment of his own TV licence but to ignore the protests of his long-suffering wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren).