Tolkien: Not quite the romantic warrior professor but certainly all three of the preceding in part. Tolkien had a tough early life, falling into impecunity, his mother had to move with J.R.R. (Harry Gilby as the young Tolkien) and his brother from a rural idyll to the satanic mills and factories of Birmingham, an early model for Mordor no doubt. Then getting excessively MisLit, his mother (Laura Donnelly) dies and he is fostered by an elderly rich lady and along with his brother gets scholarships to an exclusive school. His family's benefactor, always working behind the scenes, is Father Morgan (Colm Meaney),benevelovent but steely in his determination when Tolkien's romance with Edith threatens his chances of getting an Oxford scholarship. Morgan may have been the inspiration for Gandalf.

At school Tolkien founds a Fellowship with other artistically minded students bur the Great War will wreak havoc on that brotherhood. The film cuts between Tolkien's earlier life and the trenches of the Somme. This is literally Hell, a real Mordor. The adult J.R.R .(Nicholas Hoult) is on a (perhaps allegorical) quest to the Front to find one of the Fellowship who is missing in action. He passes through mud holes full of bodies and fever stricken imagines that a german with a flamethrower is a dragon. The film suggests many inspirations for his books, Edith (Lily Collins) as an Elven Princess, his mother's reading tales of dragons when he was a boy, the War, his schooldays. A great influence on him was the philologist Professor Wright (Derek Jacobi) who won him over to the study of Old English and Gothic languages. Directed by Dome Karukoski from a screenplay by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, Tolkien is an engaging account of the earlier life of the scholar and author. 8/10

TOLKIEN is a typical biopic of the kind that's familiar from the outset. Drama is added to the otherwise sedate story of the scholar turned world-famous fantasy author by playing up and focusing on Tolkien's brief time in the trenches in WW1, an experience he would have shared with millions of other young men of the period. These scenes are well handled, but the rest is perfectly ordinary, from the moments of tragedy and loss to the sensitive romance and upper-class upbringing which most of us will have no familiarity of whatsoever. Nicholas Hoult has always been an engaging actor but he can do little with his role in this one, and the same can be said of the rest of the cast. Like most other recent biopics of the last five years, I'd much rather read a biography.

This is a biopic of famed fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult). He becomes an orphan at an early age. He forms a fellowship with three other boys. He falls for fellow ward Edith Bratt (Lily Collins) who would become his wife and muse for his writing. He faces the devastation of the WWI trenches. These are interesting bits of a man's life. The problem is that there is no overarching drama to his life. The obvious cinematic move is to make every character and every incident in his life as literary inspirations for his iconic books. It alludes to that but only sparingly. Without that, this movie struggles to connect the interesting bits into a dramatic narrative.