Some things I liked some I did not.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I saw this TV movie as part of a documentary series on Catalan TV which specialises in docudrama and I'm still a bit confused as to which genre it belongs. Having said that, the film tells remarkably well the gripping story of how Howard Florey, Ernst Boris Chain and Norman Heatley developed penicillin between 1938 and 1942. This was after reading the paper in which Alexander Fleming made public his work with the the mould Penicillium notatum (in 1928). The film's clear aim is to honour Florey and his research team, painting a somewhat egotistic portrait of Fleming. The film transmits very well the despair of patients suffering from incurable infections before antibiotics became household items, aided by very efficient work by the make-up artists. It's peculiar to see Dominic West, usually an action man, play the Australian scientist Howard Florey yet he does very well and the film does quite fulfill its aim as a lesson in the history of science.