Roger Michell's last completed feature turns a real 1961 art heist into a warm, understated comedy about an ordinary man who refused to stay quiet.
What is The Duke about?
Jim Broadbent plays Kempton Bunton, a Newcastle pensioner and part-time taxi driver who walks into the National Gallery's Wellington gallery one morning in 1961 and leaves with Francisco Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington tucked under his coat. Helen Mirren plays his wife Dorothy, who has no idea the painting is sitting behind the wardrobe at home while investigators scour the country for it. The picture had just been bought for the nation at enormous public expense, and Bunton, furious that pensioners were charged for television licences while the government could find that kind of money for a painting, treats the theft less as a crime than as a protest. What follows is less a heist thriller than a portrait of a stubborn, funny, principled man dragged toward an Old Bailey trial that nobody, least of all the prosecution, expected to go the way it did.
About the cast
Broadbent and Mirren, playing husband and wife on screen for the first time, carry the film with a lived-in double act built from decades of British stage and screen work. Fionn Whitehead and Aimee Kelly appear as the Buntons' children, with Matthew Goode as the barrister who takes on Kempton's defence and Anna Maxwell Martin among the gallery and legal figures circling the case.
Context & significance
Roger Michell, best known for Notting Hill and Venus, shot The Duke as one of his final projects before his death in 2021, and the film carries his gift for finding comedy in ordinary British lives without ever mocking them. The screenplay leans on the record of the actual 1965 trial, including courtroom exchanges that reporters at the time struggled to believe were real. Released in cinemas after pandemic delays, the film found its wider audience through home viewing, where its gentle pace and dry humour play especially well.
Watching The Duke on Ktime
The Duke streams on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Farsi subtitles, so viewers can follow Bunton's story in either language. Signing in with a free K-Time account unlocks the film along with the rest of the library, and the platform's Farsi-first interface makes it easy for the Iranian diaspora to browse and watch without switching between apps or languages.