One Life (PG)

110 minutes, opens on April 25
4 stars

The story: In the late 1930s, at great danger, 29-year-old British stockbroker Nicholas Winton leads a volunteer mission to evacuate 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia before the Nazi Germany invasion. Anthony Hopkins stars in this World War II dramatisation.

One Life is a biopic of the British Oskar Schindler minus the narrative boldness of Schindler’s List (1993).

English television director James Hawes’ adaptation of the book If It’s Not Impossible (2014) by Winton’s daughter, Barbara Winton, is mild-mannered even when the clock is running out to secure funding, transport, visas and foster families in the United Kingdom for the children.

Johnny Flynn plays the impassioned Winton in these Prague wartime flashbacks, with Helena Bonham Carter as his formidable mother mobilising the campaign from London.

Hopkins appears in the dual-timeline narrative as the elderly Winton of half a century later. Far from basking in his heroism, he is haunted by regret over his failure to save more children, and his decency and unassuming reserve are the movie’s very qualities.

The unfussy film-making lets Hopkins do his thing. This is an actor who can summon crushing sorrow from just stillness and silence.

Winton’s humanitarianism was largely unrecognised, until the discovery of his Prague Rescue documents in 1988 landed him on the BBC magazine show That’s Life for an emotional surprise reunion – since viewed over 41 million times on YouTube – with his now-grown “Nicky’s Children”.

The survivors are a testament to his extraordinary courage, finally allowing him self-forgiveness.

His is a true story of human goodness that deserves to be told and demands to be heard in today’s troubled world.

Hot take: The telling is straightforward, but the story so innately powerful, it leaves not a dry eye in the house.

City Hunter (NC16)

102 minutes, premieres on Netflix on April 25
3 stars

The story: Tokyo is beset by bizarre violence. The perpetrators are everyday citizens suddenly possessed of superhuman strength. Private eye Ryo Saeba (Ryohei Suzuki) reluctantly allies with the sister of his associate to investigate when the latter becomes a victim.

Tsukasa Hojo’s 1980s Japanese youth comics mega-hit has been variously reconfigured into anime, as well as a 1993 Hong Kong vehicle for Jackie Chan and a 2018 French escapade.

The Netflix production City Hunter is the first Japanese live-action feature of the same-name manga, filmed on location to good effect by director Yuichi Sato (Kasane, 2018).

It is here, amid Shinjuku ward’s neon sleaze, that ace “sweeper” Ryo cleans the streets of trouble and wildly chases bosomy women.

The comedy-action-adventure, although updated to the present, resists today’s woke sensibilities. It does not ask that you approve of the hero, only that you believe starring actor Suzuki’s lusty performance of Ryo from his expert marksmanship and his cool to his eye-popping leers and all his priapic antics played for laughs.

Ernest tomboy Kaori Makimura (Misato Morita) is his foil, demanding he cut his nonsense to solve the murder of her brother Hideyuki (Masanobu Ando).

This origin story of their crime-busting partnership, which begins with a missing cosplayer (Asuka Hanamura), leads eventually to the sinister Angel Dust serum from the manga finale and also the Makimura family’s dark past.

It is a hard-boiled detective drama with the stylised kinetic gunfights – bullet time, zoom shots – of a pacy page-flipping read.

Hot take: Even the TM Network theme song Get Wild makes a comeback. Fanboys will have no complaints, and the frisky romp is for everyone else too.