badelf

Atonement (2007)

Directed by Joe Wright

The story is powerful and emotional, based on Ian McEwan's novel about a single catastrophic lie and its decades-long consequences. The screen adaptation by Christopher Hampton is as strong as, or stronger than, the source material. This is an incredible, maybe perfect, screenplay brought to life by Joe Wright with a visual style that's utterly unique. Wright doesn't just film the story; he creates a cinematic language for it, using long takes, precise compositions, and that extraordinary Dunkirk tracking shot that moves through chaos with impossible grace.

The continuity of the three actors who played the aging Briony, from Saoirse Ronan as the precocious child who tells the lie, to Romola Garai as the young woman seeking redemption through nursing, to Dame Vanessa Redgrave as the elderly novelist still wrestling with her past, was astonishing. You believe completely that you're watching the same person at different stages of life, carrying the same guilt, the same need for atonement that can never quite be achieved. This is a huge accomplishment of Joe Wright's direction, and of course of the three actors who inhabited the role with such precision that the transitions feel seamless.

The film takes place within a period when the meaning of class has begun to erode and evolve. Robbie (James McAvoy) is the housemaid's son, educated by the Tallis family, loving Cecilia (Keira Knightley) across a class divide that's starting to crack but hasn't broken. World War II accelerates that dissolution; the old order is dying, but it still has enough power to destroy lives. Briony's lie works because the authorities want to believe it, because a working-class man accused of assaulting an upper-class girl fits their worldview too perfectly to question.

What haunts about Atonement is the recognition that some things cannot be undone, that guilt carried for a lifetime doesn't necessarily lead to redemption. Wright crafted a film that understands this with devastating clarity, refusing easy absolution or false comfort. It's a masterpiece, one of the finest literary adaptations ever filmed.

10/10

There's a particular discomfort in discovering, after decades of historical education and over a hundred Holocaust-related films, that significant chapters of atrocity have remained invisible to me. "Dara of Jasenovac" delivers precisely this uncomfortable revelation, chronicling horrors at Croatia's Jasenovac concentration camp - a genocide I had never encountered in history books or cinema.

Predrag Antonijevic's unflinching film follows ten-year-old Dara through what was sometimes called "the Auschwitz of the Balkans", where the fascist Ustase regime murdered primarily Serbs, but also Jews, Roma, and political dissidents. That such a significant murder camp could remain relatively unknown in the Western conscious speaks to the politics of historical memory. What distinguishes this story is not just its focus on a lesser-known atrocity, but its disturbing examination of Croatia's independent enthusiasm for mass murder, without direct Nazi management.

"Dara of Jasenovac" functions as both historical correction and cold mirror. The film's most devastating insight is not historical but philosophical. Through Dara's eyes, we witness the seamless transformation of ordinary people into monsters. Unlike the bureaucratic, industrialized killing of Nazi death camps, Jasenovac reveals something more primal - the apparent eagerness with which humans will torture and murder their neighbors when given permission by authority.

The film's power comes largely from its uncompromising realism. Antonijevic's direction, the haunting cinematography, meticulously detailed sets, and the extraordinarily naturalistic performances - especially from Biljana Cekic as Dara - create an immersive historical world that feels horrifyingly authentic. Cekic's performance is remarkable for its restraint; her watchful eyes become our lens into this nightmare.

This movie raises the questions "How could this specific atrocity be forgotten?", and the more significant "What within human nature makes such cruelty possible?" Both these questions are terribly uncomfortable. The latter even more terrifying in the light of the rise of fascist power in the United States. That humans so readily inflict suffering on one another when ideologically sanctioned, casts the lens on the darkest side of our human nature.

"Dara of Jasenovac" is difficult, necessary cinema that reminds us that the phrase "never again" remains hollow so long as significant chapters of atrocity remain unacknowledged and the human capacity for cruelty remains unexamined.