The Duke

The Duke (2021) is a British comedy-drama directed by Roger Michell — watch it online on iFILM. Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren lead this stranger-than-fiction true story: in 1961, a stubborn sixty-year-old taxi driver named Kempton Bunton walked out of London's National Gallery with a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington — the first and only theft in the gallery's history.

Bunton didn't want a ransom. He wanted the government to pay attention to pensioners. What followed was a courtroom standoff between an ordinary man with an extraordinary principle and a British establishment that couldn't quite decide whether to be furious or charmed. Mirren plays his wife Dorothy — loving, exhausted, and far sharper than anyone around her.

One of Michell's final films, The Duke keeps its sentimentality firmly in check: Broadbent's performance makes you root for a man who is genuinely infuriating, and that tension is exactly what the film is after. Stream The Duke (2021) online on iFILM.