The Railway Man

World War II has given us more movies than any other war in history, maybe more than any other historical event. Somehow, there are still stories to tell. The Railway Man covers events in 1942 and 1980 and brings us Eric Lomax (Jeremy Irvine as a younger man and then, principally, Colin Firth) as he endures torture at the hands of his Japanese captors in Singapore and eventually confronts his own memories of the past. Lomax was in one of the prison camps that helped build the Burma Railway, made more infamous than it already was in another WWII movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. The Railway Man is a soft-spoken affair, which presumably aligns with Lomax and his decades of pain. Firth is terrific, although as his wife, Nicole Kidman barely makes much of an impression.