Often wishy-washy, Knightley comes into her own as unassuming British intelligence officer Katharine Gunn.įar from a crusader, the real-life whistle-blower was thrown headlong into a terrible moral conundrum on receiving a US-directed email brazenly calling on UK intelligence officers to assist coercing smaller members of the UN to support invading Iraq. Driver and Bening are an indomitable duo, and writer/director Scott Z Burns – who also penned Steven Soderbergh’s Panama Papers biopic The Laundromat – clearly nods at the parlous state of global politics today.ĭirected by Gavin Hood ( Eye in the Sky) co-writing alongside husband and wife duo Gregory and Sara Bernstein, it’s grippingly adapted from tell-all book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War. “But it can, and does, say to our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it’s wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes.” “The release of this 500-page summary cannot remove that stain. “It shows that the CIA’s action a decade ago are a stain on our values and on our history,” Feinstein said at the time. The report has never been released in full, although a 500-page summary appeared in 2014. Mad Men star Jon Hamm plays Denis McDonough, President Obama’s chief of staff who is just as keen to silence criticism. Methodically taking apart the case for torture, hammering home both the moral abdication and the total failure to uncover valuable intelligence, The Report grips from the get go. While that might sound stuffy, it zings with righteous fury served ice cold. Playing Daniel Jones, the real-life political staffer of former Intelligence Committee chair Senator Dianne Feinstein (an also brilliant Annette Bening), Driver gives an incredible turn that builds and builds to pack a mighty wallop.ĭoggedly determined, Jones worked tirelessly in the face of significant resistance to compile a 6700-word report on the CIA’s use, and cover-up of, brutal torture under the Bush administration.Ī Herculean mission consuming seven years, The Report exhilaratingly details his rapidly dwindling team’s exhaustive trawl through thousands of CIA emails, with no direct access to interviewees. While those two grab most headlines – the least said about zombie dud The Dead Don’t Die the better – his understated delivery in The Report is arguably better. While special screenings of James Bond films have been organised for MI6 staff, 007’s style and attitudes are not regarded as a model for an agency that prefers cerebral, low-profile recruits.About to unleash the dark side as baddie Kylo Ren in grand finale Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, he’s also igniting Oscars buzz alongside Scarlett Johansson in bittersweet Netflix triumph Marriage Story. For the past nine years she has been living in Turkey with her Turkish husband and their daughter.īritain’s spy agencies have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. She had to abandon her civil service career and eventually left Britain altogether. The legal case against Gun was dropped by the British government in 2004, after her lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, threatened to use disclosure to put the legal basis of the war itself on trial. The events are dramatised in the film, in which Knightley’s portrayal of Gun has been praised by critics. The memo ended up in the hands of the Observer, which broke the story Gun was arrested and charged with breach of the Official Secrets Act. Gun, a translator, copied the memo and leaked it anonymously, before owning up a few days later to save her GCHQ colleagues from a witch hunt. The film tells the story of Gun’s decision in 2003 to leak a copy of a memo from the US National Security Agency asking them to listen into the communications of the smaller members of the UN Security Council, at a critical point in the run-up to the Iraq war.
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