‘The Penguin Lessons’ Is a Waddling Delight

Here’s an unexpected charmer, a true story based on a popular autobiographical memoir about a man and a penguin, with a lightness of tone that doesn’t overdo the whimsy. The excellent Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a cynical and disillusioned British writer and scholar who accepted a job in 1976 teaching proper English, poetry and soccer in an upscale boys’ prep school in Buenos Aires at the height of Argentina’s postwar military dictatorship. Intelligently directed by Peter Cattaneo, the man best remembered for The Full Monty...