A woman makes a surprising discovery with dangerous consequences in this period suspense thriller, set in 1939. Anne Keyes (Romola Garai) is an attractive young woman who is enjoying modest success as a film actress; she's also the adopted daughter of Alexander Keyes (Bill Nighy), a career politician and member of Parliament. Anne still lives in the family home with her father, mother Maud (Jenny Agutter), budding diplomat brother Ralph (Eddie Redmayne) and socialite sister Celia (Juno Temple).
One night, Hector (David Tennant), one of Alexander's friends, stops by for dinner and during a heated conversation makes no secret of his disapproval of prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his efforts to appease Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime. Another dinner guest, Balcombe (Jeremy Northam) doesn't care for what Hector has to say, and later that evening, Hector is found dead, an apparent suicide. Anne, however, begins to suspect foul play when she finds a set of phonograph records that document conversations of men discussing state intelligence secrets. When Anne ties to share this discovery with others, they're soon found dead, and she's no longer certain what she should do with these deadly secrets. Glorious 39 was an official selection at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Despite a few convincing turns, the feature is disappointingly winded, eventually going off on a few needless tangents that derail the whole production.
Stupendous turn from Romola Garai in the lead role but, while this sets up intrigue and atmosphere well, the plot devices creak audibly towards the end.
For all its sumptuous production design, Steven Poliakoff's tale of glamorous toffs and treason is so laboured and slow that it's practically pensionable.
A bizarrely tasteless pet-euthanasia subplot -- clumsy parallels with the Holocaust abound -- is merely the wackiest turn the wildly unconvincing script takes: it's well below Poliakoff's more intelligent TV work.
Trapped in a perilous zone between TV and cinema, this wartime conspiracy thriller ploughs through an improbable plot with all the urgency of a snail going through wet concrete.
Unfortunately, Stephen Poliakoff's tale of wartime skulduggery should have stayed on paper. The sort you can flush. Tedious, overlong and laughably unconvincing, the only remarkable thing about it is Bill Nighy's performance. Specifically, how bad it is.
Poliakoff's conspiracy thriller about Hitler-pleasers and appalling aristos comes with all the bucolic loveliness you'd expect. But its biggest boost comes from Garai, whose fragile, hypnotic turn should make the actress a gong contender.
There's much to admire in the film, such as sequences of the often forgotten panic when family pets were systematically put down as war became inevitable, but there's quite a lot to argue about too.
As a director of child actors, Poliakoff is hopeless. Worst of all, he seems not to have seen many movie thrillers in the past 20 years, for the pacing is pedestrian and the camerawork static, more redolent of bad episodes of Midsomer Murders.
Stephen Poliakoff performs his usual routine of conjuring an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue for the first hour and failing to fulfil it in the second.
The cast is impressive - Julie Christie, Jenny Agutter, David Tennant, Hugh Bonneville, Christopher Lee - though more astonishing is why any of them were tempted into such tosh.
This movie demonstrates the lengths some will go in the name of "what's best" for the country (whatever that country may be). Well acted but the pace is way too slow! The end was such a large dose of cheese, I feel to could constipate many!
Set in beautiful surroundings this conspiracy thriller has many fine moments but is a little long winded which lessens the considerable tension it manages to build at points. All the performances are good the two standouts being Romola Garai in the lead and Julie Christie who plays an atypical role with silky
malevolence.
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