Mr. Jones

Mr. Jones is a drama set in 1933, following Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist who travels to Moscow hoping to interview Joseph Stalin about the Soviet Union's widely publicised achievements. Once there, he finds his contacts evasive and his movements watched, and he is drawn instead towards Ukraine, where a source alerts him to something the authorities are determined to conceal. What he encounters there is a man-made famine, and his efforts to report it put him in conflict with the Soviet secret services and with those in the West who prefer the official account.

Agnieszka Holland directed the film, which sits between her 2017 film Spoor and Charlatan, released in 2020. Andrea Chalupa wrote the screenplay and produced alongside Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska and Stanislaw Dziedzic. James Norton plays Gareth Jones, with Vanessa Kirby as Ada Brooks, Peter Sarsgaard as Walter Duranty and Joseph Mawle as George Orwell. The production was a co-production involving Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Poland, with a credited cast of 28 and crew of 85.

Released in October 2019, the film took about 3 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.9 from roughly 18,000 votes and on TMDB 6.7 from 488 votes, closely in line with the critics' rating of 6.8 from 104 reviews, so audiences and reviewers responded to it in much the same way.