De
Gaulle: Liberté review – biopic of conquering French war hero reaches his
imperial era
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A shrewd
performance by Simon Abkarian leads this blockbuster account of the wartime
leader’s career as he ascends to political dominance
Thu 17
Sep 2026 11.00 BST
The
massive and commercially triumphant two-part movie about General Charles de Gaulle
comes to end with this second half, which does not, as I half expected it
might, go into the complex area of De Gaulle’s postwar career and the issue of
French Algeria. Maybe another movie, a part three, can cover this. Liberté
takes us from De Gaulle’s growing international celebrity, or indeed notoriety,
as the exiled keeper of the Free French flame, the king over the water, in
which role his authority is still, however, contested and undermined. It
includes the triumph of the D-Day landings and the liberation of France, in the
course of which De Gaulle (Simon Abkarian) brings off the miracle of persuading
the Americans, in the form of President Roosevelt (Campbell Scott), to back him
when they had originally intended to treat postwar France as hardly more than a
glorified US dependency, like postwar Japan.
De
Gaulle’s stormy bromance with Winston Churchill (who is wonderfully played by
Simon Russell Beale), continues from the first half, and the film genuinely has
something new to say about Churchill’s Francophilia. It shows us De Gaulle’s
foxy cunning, appearing to accept joint status in the provisional French
government with General Henri Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte), his rival in the
Allied leaders’ affections – and then deftly ousting him. But as in Résistance,
the first part, it is in the African theatre of conflict that a new French hero
arises; that is General Leclerc (Niels Schneider) whose maverick daring and
improvisational brilliance is inspired by De Gaulle. Montgomery, incidentally,
is shrewdly played by Pip Torrens, and I was wondering until the last moment if
there would be a gamey cameo for Rommel, perhaps played by Lars
Eidinger. But no. Germans are apparently not allowed in this mythic
retelling.
As
before, Abkarian has plenty of scenes where he gets out of military aircraft
and haughtily sizes up the reception awaiting him, hyper-alert to tiny slights
to his status and thereby to France
itself. He cannot enter a room in this film without a moment in which he
considers who is there and how they might insult him; Abkarian makes the most
of this amusing dark comedy. Perhaps Liberté doesn’t quite have the intrigue
and the intimate drama of the first half but it is still a rousingly watchable
movie, a French production in the spirit of J Lee Thompson or John Sturges.
De
Gaulle: Liberté is in UK and Irish cinemas from 18 September.
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