Director: Joe Wright, 15, 2007
Stars: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan
Out to buy and rent on DVD
Another strangulated British period drama? Hardly – Joe Wright has a point when he calls his adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel “a brutal film”, a barrage of physical and emotional carnage.
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But brutality has rarely been so elegantly packaged and nowhere more so than in the bravura tracking shot recreating the Dunkirk evacuation. The crew managed three five-minute takes, Wright reveals in his commentary – the Steadicam operator collapsed on the fourth. Knightley and McEvoy will be disappointed to miss the Oscars, but the Academy got it right by recognising instead the astonishing Ronan, whose hysterical 13-year-old ignites much of that brutality.
DVD extras
Commentary, making of featurette, deleted scenes, novel to screen