TL;DR
The new Peaky Blinders film has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and an anti-fascist plot that feels less like history than like tomorrow's headline.
MSM Perspective
Variety and Deadline praise the performances and production values while treating the anti-fascist storyline as period decoration rather than commentary.
X Perspective
Fans are treating it as a victory lap for Cillian Murphy; almost nobody online is touching the fascism-in-2026 subtext.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man arrived on Netflix on March 20 carrying a Certified Fresh 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and the sort of premise that would be rejected as too on-the-nose if a screenwriter pitched it today. [1] The year is 1940. Tommy Shelby, played once more by Cillian Murphy with his trademark quiet-storm menace, is dragged from rural retirement to confront a Nazi plot to flood Britain with counterfeit currency and collapse the economy from within. Tim Roth plays the fascist treasurer; Barry Keoghan plays the estranged son who nearly falls for it. [2]
Steven Knight, the show's creator, has said the quiet part aloud: the historical themes "feel surprisingly relevant today." [3] One might observe that a story about nationalism dressed in respectable clothing, economic sabotage as a weapon of war, and the thin line between state violence and organized crime does not require a great deal of imaginative leaping to land in 2026. Knight wrote a period piece. Current events wrote the commentary.
Variety's Guy Lodge called it "dutiful fan service" elevated by Murphy's stillness and George Steel's film-shot cinematography, noting that "heroism has always had a sadistic streak" in this world. [2] He is right. What makes the film land is not that it is subtle -- it is not -- but that it treats its anti-fascist conviction as something other than decoration.
The boys are back in town. So, unfortunately, is everything they were fighting.
-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London
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