Brian and Charles

Brian is an eccentric inventor living alone in a Welsh valley, filling his days with contraptions that rarely work. After a harsh winter leaves him isolated and low, he builds a companion from spare parts, including a discarded mannequin head and a washing machine. The result is Charles, a robot who picks up English from a dictionary and turns out to be cheeky and engaging company. Charles soon begins to want more than the cottage where Brian keeps him, and his curiosity about the world outside sets up the film's central tension between creator and creation.

Jim Archer directs from a screenplay by David Earl and Chris Hayward, who also star as Brian and Charles respectively. Louise Brealey, Jamie Michie, Nina Sosanya and Lynn Hunter round out the cast. The film is a British production from Focus Features, Film4, the BFI and Bankside Films, made for about 1 million USD, and it runs 91 minutes.

It was released in June 2022. On IMDb it holds 6.7/10 from around 10,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.3/10 from a much smaller pool of 192 votes. A critics' rating of 7.1/10 from 104 reviews places it above both audience scores, suggesting reviewers responded to it more warmly than general viewers did.