Average Rating: 5/10
Reviews Counted: 23
Fresh: 11 | Rotten: 12
No consensus yet.
Release Date: Nov 20, 2009 Wide
liked it
Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 1,819
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).
Nov 20, 2009 Wide
Feb 15, 2011
E1 Entertainment
All Critics (23) | Fresh (11) | Rotten (12)
Despite a few convincing turns, the feature is disappointingly winded, eventually going off on a few needless tangents that derail the whole production.
An enjoyable conspiracy thriller in the manner of John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May.
Not glorious. Not good. Just plain old-fashioned duff.
Prestigious and serious-minded, but it's still nonsense.
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.
A political yarn - sometimes creepy, sometimes daft - in the Hitchcockian vein.
Poliakoff's flaccid script and indulgent cut undermines a beautifully shot thriller with an excellent cast and original central idea.
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 ripping, old-school conspiracy thriller.
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.
The increasingly camp air of menace is actually pretty enjoyable.
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.
Poliakoff cleverly translates the mood of fear and uncertainty in Britain into a dark psychological maze that leads Anne to the edge of insanity.
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.
Romola Garai is extremely good but the film is an elegant disappointment.
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!
February 27, 2011Super Reviewer
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
November 23, 2010
Super Reviewer
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