Sony Pictures Classics will release The Duke, the dramedy film directed by Roger Michell and starring Academy Award® winners Jim Broadbent along with Helen Mirren, in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on March 25, 2022, before expanding in the following weeks. The film is currently playing at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles for a one-week awards qualifying run, which ends December 16th.
Previously, the film has played at the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals. It is the final film from Michell, who sadly passed away in September.
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 remains the only) theft in the Gallery’s history. Kempton sent ransom notes saying that he would return the painting on condition that the government agreed 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 his marriage.
Watch the official trailer for The Duke