Secrets and lies
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It's the hot summer of 1935- England will soon be at war- and a young girl called Briony Tallas has just finished writing a play. She sets out to show it to her family. She walks around the family's manor house in a strange, almost robotic stance, head held high, the sounds of a typewriter echoing away in the background. This is a girl so wrapped up in the world of stories and fiction that she even walks to the sound of typewriters, and that sound will follow her throughout her life. Listen out for it- in almost every scene it's clicking away in the background somewhere. Much like the terrible crime Briony commits, she cannot escape from it, and nor can the victims of her crime.

These victims are her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Cecilia's lover Robbie (James McAvoy)- respectively the eldest daughter of the house and the son of a servant. Briony observes her sister taking her clothes off in front of Robbie, she reads a saucy letter from Robbie to Cecilia, and finally she spies them making love. At the age of thirteen, and growing up sheltered, she cannot process it and so she blames Robbie. When her cousin is raped in the grounds of the manor, she tells the police the rapist had to be Robbie. There is no evidence, so she lies and tells the police she saw him. Robbie is dragged away from Cecilia in handcuffs, and for the rest of her life Briony struggles to atone for what she has done.

There's not a bad performance anywhere in this film. James McAvoy proves once again he's one of the most reliably excellent actors working today, Keira Knightley turns in her finest performance to date (not once will you think of Elizabeth Swann while watching her), and all of the three actresses playing Briony (Saiose Ronan plays her as a young girl, Romola Garai as a teenager, and Vanessa Redgrave as an old woman) are excellent. Saiose Ronan especially- she has arguably the most difficult role in the film, and pulls it off magnificently. A lot of fame awaits this young lady. The directing too is excellent: the five-minute Steadicam sequence is stunning and packs an emotional punch, and in general it's actually really quite hard to find any major flaws in this film. Maybe it's not one for the summer blockbuster crowd, but if you love gorgeous Oscar-bait romances, there probably won't be a finer one this year. Furthermore, the ending- the brilliant ending, all about stories and happy endings and the responsibilities of writers- will break you. Bring tissues.

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