The Duke

The final narrative film from late director Roger Michell (Le Week-end, Notting Hill), and starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, The Duke is set in 1961, when Kempton Bunton, a 60-year-old taxi driver, stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. It was the first (and, to date, only) theft in the Gallery’s history. Kempton sent ransom notes saying that he would return the painting, but only on the condition that the government agree to provide television for free to the elderly; What happened next became the stuff of legend. Only 50 years later did the full story emerge—a startling revelation of how a good man set out to change the world, and in so doing, saved his son and marriage.