The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer
Official Secrets (15)
Directed by Gavin Hood
BASED on the true story of British whistleblower Katharine Gun, who put her career and family on the line in an attempt to stop the Iraq war in 2003, this sharp political thriller still resonates loudly.
Gun, played superbly by Keira Knightley, was a Mandarin translator at GCHQ who leaked an email to The Observer in which the US spook agency the NSA asked Britain to gather intelligence — or dirt — on certain members of the UN security council to persuade them to vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq.
Sadly, Gun failed and to avoid a witch-hunt of her colleagues she confessed to her actions. She was charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act but wasn’t taken to court until a year later. In the meantime, her Turkish husband was threatened with deportation.
MARIA DUARTE recommends that this dramatic reconstruction of one instance of the Israeli killings in Gaza be seen as widely as possible
MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Friendship, Four Letters of Love, Tin Soldier and The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire
MARIA DUARTE recommends the ambitious portrait of an agricultural community confronted by the trauma of enclosure
MARIA DUARTE recommends the very human portrayal of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist in Putin’s Russia


