Tag: Keira Knightley

Screening Room: ‘The Woman in Cabin 10’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

I reviewed the adaptation of Ruth Ware’s mystery The Woman in Cabin 10 for Slant Magazine:

Simon Stone’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is a locked-room mystery in which Laura (Keira Knightley), an investigative reporter for The Guardian, is invited by mysterious billionaire couple Richard (Guy Pearce) and Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) onto their luxury yacht. The cruise to Norway, doubling as self-regarding announcement of a massive philanthropic venture and a last big party for the deathly ill Anne, has barely begun when Laura sees a woman fall overboard. Told everybody on the yacht is accounted for, Laura at first thinks that she’s being gaslit. Later, after an unseen person shoves her into a pool where she almost drowns, Laura starts to believe that she’s the next to be murdered…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Official Secrets’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment

(IFC Films)

In the new thriller from Gavin Hood (Rendition), Keira Knightley plays the real-life whistle-blower who tried to stop the UK from bending to US pressure to cook up intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Based on Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War, Official Secrets opens this week. My review is at PopMatters:

This is usually a time of drudgery, when sloppy comedies and stupid worn out action franchises waste everyone’s time. So it comes as a nice surprise to watch a corker like Gavin Hood’s unexpectedly jarring and immediate espionage thriller Official Secrets unspool in a close, carefully calibrated way that actually grabs one by the conscience…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘Begin Again’ Sings

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Keira Knightley (left), Mark Ruffalo (right), and a passel of ready-for-anything musicians in 'Begin Again' (Weinstein Company)
Keira Knightley (left), Mark Ruffalo (right), and a passel of ready-for-anything musicians in ‘Begin Again’ (Weinstein Company)

When John Carney made the incomparable Dublin street-musical Once, he ginned up magic from the mundane. With the glitzier and slightly more stock Begin Again, he uses the same starry-eyed formula for almost equally wonderful results.

Begin_Again1Begin Again is playing now around the country. My review is at Film Racket:

Nothing in Begin Again, a grin-machine Roman candle of a film, should work. It features more cliches than should be legally allowed. A starry-eyed and uncompromising songwriter. A bum music producer needing one last shot. A rising star who just dumped the songwriter to get busy losing his soul. The comic relief guy. A fractured family that just needs their dad to get his act together. A basket full of dreams. Some beautiful songs that just need to be heard. New. York. City. But writer/director John Carney gets away with it, whipping through the stock situations with a hummingbird-light grace….

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - NewLeave a comment

Chris Pine exploring a post-Cold War Moscow in 'Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit'
Chris Pine exploring a post-Cold War Moscow in ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’

Jack_Ryan_Shadow_Recruit_posterTom Clancy’s Jack Ryan was your basic all-around Cold War fighter, able to lead men into battle and synthesize data with equal ease; an analyst who knew his way around a battlefield. Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck have played him in the four movie adaptations of Clancy’s bestselling novels. Now, just a few months after Clancy’s passing, Kenneth Branagh’s new take on the series hits screens with Star Trek‘s Chris Pine in the starring role and a wholly new storyline “inspired by” the Ryan books.

My review is at Film Journal International:

For this second reboot after 2002’s unloved Ben Affleck vehicle The Sum of All Fears, the Cold War franchise is repurposed for new threats with a dramatically younger-seeming hero. It’s a high-action and chase-heavy origin story in the more self-aware Casino Royale mold, with brisker action and nods at its hero’s vulnerabilities. Chris Pine is now the fourth actor to strap on the security badge as Jack Ryan. With his glowing blue eyes and the demeanor of a just-barely-reformed frat guy fresh out of college, he’s by far the most schoolboy of the lot, though at 34 he’s actually older than Alec Baldwin was when inaugurating the character in 1990’s The Hunt for Red October. Pine isn’t the worst choice for the role, he has a whippet physicality and a crafty gleam, but it’s hard to see him growing old in this role…

Kenneth Branagh and Keira Knightley get friendly
Kenneth Branagh and Keira Knightley get friendly

You can see the trailer here:

New in Theaters: ‘Anna Karenina’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - NewLeave a comment

Having detoured from tasteful literary adaptations like Pride & Prejudice into techno-scored mayhem with last year’s killer Hanna, Joe Wright is now back in the classics biz, with a Tom Stoppard-scripted take on Anna Karenina, which opens Friday.

My review is at Film Journal International:

All the world’s a stage in this highly self-aware yet free-flowing take on Tolstoy’s great novel of doomed romance and the thorny collision of ideals with the world of real humans. Joe Wright’s exciting take will divide audiences, but for those who go along for the ride, they’ll thrill at how it blows their hair back. Instead of moving from one stately mansion to the next, Wright sets most of his scenes inside the same grand but vaguely decrepit theatre, with obvious backdrops and stage props, adding music and elaborate choreography to further stylize the action. It can be read as a statement on the highly artificial world that the Russian aristocracy had entrapped itself in, circa 1874, or a device heightening the novel’s already potent melodrama…

You can see the trailer here: