terribly wrong. Tariff the dire wolves, President Trump. They, like the penguins, need to learn who’s boss.

At this particular juncture in history, what are we meant to take from a film about a man politically radicalised by a penguin? It’s unclear – but still, The Penguin Lessons persists.

It plays, instead, like moral negligence. Its man-penguin meet cute is adapted directly from Tom Michell’s 2015 memoirs about teaching in a Buenos Aires boys’s prep school. But the idea that ...