“A ticking-clock thriller following Winston Churchill in the 96 hours before D-Day” is how this film is being sold. Don’t believe it. Churchill could generously be called intimate and leisurely, which still hardly makes for an exciting time at the movies. But the film is more fairly deemed small-scale, low stakes and emotionally unengaging. Historian Alex von Tunzelmann, making her screenwriting debut, explores Churchill’s (Brian Cox) well-documented opposition to D-Day even as he had no strategic input on the invasion plans and no standing to forestall the action. This position is at odds with his reputation as one of the great political heroes of World War II, and the film comes across more as a needling way to undercut, not humanize, a near-mythic figure. Director Jonathan Teplitzky (The Railway Man) doesn’t seem to know how to restrain Cox’s histrionics—or perhaps he encouraged them in an attempt to lend more weight to a story that has little of its own. The result is a movie that doesn’t so much run out of steam as it is never able to develop any in the first place. By MaryAnn Johanson