The Aeronauts

Tom Harper (Wild Rose) takes the helm of a high-flying drama that's beguilingly beautiful if historically iffy. Reuniting The Theory of Everything's stars Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, it tells the story of pioneering meteorologist James Glaisher (Redmayne), whose record-breaking 1862 hot-air-balloon trip with Henry Coxwell is recreated with fictional pilot Amelia Wren (Jones, playing a character in part inspired by French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard). The flight of their plump, candy-striped craft is fraught with exciting, immersively shot incident - an encounter with butterflies is a delightful surprise, while plummeting temperatures and raging storms provide basket-shaking peril. The film positively soars in such scenes but the background to their intrepid adventure is less imaginatively rendered, from the stereotypical pooh-poohing by the establishment of Glaisher's theories to the pair's thinly drawn personal lives. Still, the central duo capture their characters' contradictions: Wren's gutsy persona masks her inner agony and Redmayne takes Glaisher from mild-mannered scientist to Icarus-esque egotist. Though stylistically tending toward the safe, The Aeronauts is at its best with its head in the clouds.