Metacritic reviews

It’s a trifle silly. But you don’t have to take Six Minutes to Midnight seriously to lose yourself in the pleasure of some very fine actors having a go at an old fashioned B-movie, poppycock included.

Six Minutes to Midnight is entertaining enough if a little underwhelming.

Director Andy Goddard’s film is far too aware of its subject’s peculiarity, and every frame knows full well that something is a bit off.

Six Minutes to Midnight shifts focus between classroom drama and war thriller without allowing time for either genre to take shape.

Andy Goddard’s film clumsily superimposes a frenzied, completely fictional spy adventure onto a fascinating fragment of pre-war history.

It’s a potentially intriguing bit of fiction that plays out in, at best, serviceable ways.

The double-crosses are depicted by the director Andy Goddard with better-than-average craft, but the more the movie leans into old suspense conventions the more interest it loses, alas.

The movie is dogged by wobbly reasoning and dramaturgical lassitude, but at least one actor tries to spice it up. There are certainly other performers who emerge unembarrassed — Dench does a lovely turn from foolishness into new wisdom, for instance. But D’Arcy is as silly as the film itself and the only one who knows what movie he’s in.

A lively idea for a drama, but the sheer oddity of the real-life premise slows it down.

It would be nice to say that Judi Dench, inevitably the headmistress, elevates the project, but even she can’t get gas back into the plummeting Zeppelin (wrong war, I know).