Living

[Opens Dec. 23 in theaters.] Oliver Hermanus' poignant, somber, down-to-earth, low-key, touching, nonlinear, 102-minute film adapted from the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru and inspired by Leo Tolstoy's 1886 Russian novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich in which a widowed, reserved, taciturn, longtime British civil servant (Bill Nighy), who is in a bureaucratic rut and has lived a mundane life with his son (Barney Fishwick) and daughter in-law (Patsy Ferran), in London learns he has stomach cancer and has about six months to live in 1953, befriends a comely office employee (Aimee Lou Wood) and treats her to a fancy lunch, and then surprises his coworkers (Alex Sharp, Adrian Rawlins, Tom Burke, Hubert Burton, Anant Varman, Oliver Chris, et al.) when he leads the charge to get a playground built for children to the delight of the East End parents.
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