Gripping secrets that echo through the years
OFFICIAL SECRETS
★★★★✩ (15, 112 mins)
Director: Gary Hood
Stars: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Rhys Ifans, Matt Smith
MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL
★★★★✩
(PG, 119 mins)
Director: Joachim Rønning
Stars: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert Lindsay
A SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE: FARMAGEDDON
(Ewe, 87 mins)
Directors: Will Becher, Richard Phelan
W★★★★✩
ITH films set in the late 20th century, it usually falls to the art department to evoke the spirit of the decade. For the 1970s, a quick shot of a poster of a knickerless tennis girl with an itchy bottom will usually do the trick.
For the 1980s, you just need an extra in the back of the frame with a spring in his step and a gigantic mobile phone pressed against his ear and so on.
As most of us dressed and behaved more or less the same in the Noughties, this isn’t quite so straightforward. So in the fact-based political thriller
Official Secrets, Keira Knightley has to use the pitch of her voice to send us hurtling back in time.
In the opening scene, her spy Katharine Gun is trying to unwind in front of a slightly old-fashioned TV after a busy day of eavesdropping on phone calls at Cheltenham’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
Unfortunately,tony Blair is on the news and he’s spouting forth about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his links to Al Qaeda. “Just because you’re the Prime Minister, doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts!” Gun shrieks.
Knightley’s tone, a mixture of incredulity and outrage, suddenly makes 2003 feel like a lost age of innocence.
Gun isn’t quite so vocal when she is sent a memo from America’s National Security Agency asking British spooks for dirt the Bush administration can use to blackmail United Nations members.
Now she’s in a quandary. If she leaks the memo she will lose her job and probably be sent to prison. But if she does nothing, will she have committed an even bigger crime?
It is precisely this dilemma that faced the poor CIA agent tasked with listening in to Trump’s loose-lipped conversation with the president of Ukraine. Even recent history, it seems, has a habit of repeating itself.
This fortuitously topical drama doesn’t just passionately advocate the importance of whistleblowers, it tells the story of the journalists who break the story.
Knightley has never been better, conveying the defiance as well as the vulnerability of this unlikely heroine.
Sadly, not all the characters convince in scenes set in the Observer newspaper. Matt Smith is solid as investigative reporter Martin Bright but Rhys Ifans hams it up horribly as grizzledwashington correspondent Edvulliamy.
If you can remember Hollywood’s whistleblower drama The Post, you may find the pace a little pedestrian. Hood seems more concerned with taking us through the facts than sending us on an emotional rollercoaster.yet the details of the journalist’s investigations and Gunn’s dealings with Ralph Fiennes’s lawyer Ben Emmerson make this movie engrossing.
The film posits the theory that Scotland Yard and the CPS became pawns in a shady plan to break Gun’s resolve after she admitted leaking the document.
We also see how the memo was quickly dismissed as fake news in the US due to a sub editor’s decision to change the word “favorite” to the British spelling.
Weirdly, there is also a topical edge to Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil, Disney’s big budget sequel to its under-rated 2014 hit.the first film invited us to view the witch from Sleeping Beauty (Angelina Jolie) as a traumatised victim whose righteous anger was tamed by her love for Aurora (Elle Fanning), the human child she cursed but then adopted.
Now her human heir is set to wed her Prince Charming (Harris Dickinson), a union that should finally unite the human and fairy kingdoms.
Hopes of a happy-ever-after are shattered, however, when the vampish Maleficent (Jolie resplendent in black gown and Cgi-sculpted cheekbones) is invited to meet the royal in-laws.
In a hilarious scene, the mothers exchange catty remarks at the feasting table.this ends with the King (Robert Lindsay) seemingly cursed and the vengeful Queen (Michelle Pfeiffer) declaring war on the fairies.
What follows is a bizarre fantasy that combines Lord Of The Rings-style battles with modern concerns about intolerance and political disinformation.
It could be a shade too dark for some children, but the costumes and production design shine very brightly.
Parents can breathe a lot easier with
the second big screen adventure for Aardman’s woolly hero.
This time the studio is playing fast and loose with science-fiction as its naughty ruminant befriends adorable alien Lu-la who crash lands at Mossy Bottom Farm.
There is plenty of slapstick for Shaun’s younger fans, while adults will savour the sly visual gags that spoof everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to more recent space movies like Arrival.
Again, there’s no dialogue for young children to follow with Shaun’s utterances restricted to the expressive bleating and baaing of voice artist Justin Fletcher (CBBC’S Mr Tumble).
It feels like the Wallace And Gromit makers are aiming a little younger with this sheep-quel but it’s just as charming.