Rate It
|
||||||||||||||||
Rating Averages
My Friends |
Not rated. () |
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
All Flixster |
(73661) |
51804 |
29180 |
Female |
(35747) |
25140 |
14161 |
Male |
(37914) |
26664 |
15019 |
More Like This
If you liked this, then you'll also probably like...
Got another recommendation for someone who liked this movie? Add it to the list!
Got an opinion? Use the buttons to vote on all the suggestions people have added.
If lots of people vote, the best suggestions will rise to the top.
| The Painted Veil (86%) |
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Pride and Prejudice (82%) |
|
|
| Titanic (71%) |
|
|
| De Tweeling (Twin Sisters) (0%) |
|
|
| Gosford Park (65%) |
|
|
Plot:
Fledgling writer Briony Tallis, as a 13-year-old, irrevocably changes the course of several lives when she accuses her older sister's lover of a crime he did not commit. Based on the British romance n...( read more 
)
Meet Other Fans
-
ONLINE NOW -
ONLINE NOW -
ONLINE NOW -
ONLINE NOW -
ONLINE NOW -
-
-
Recent Reviews
-
MCT:August 26, 2008
Long, but good. The length of the movie allows you to grow with the characters. Leads to an ending different from any other.
-
MCT:August 25, 2008
It was a slow and grippingly sad movie and you keep wondering how can people do those things to other people.
-
MCT:August 24, 2008What a beautiful story and so romantic and tragic at the same time. But I read the book first then I just saw the movie but the nook its better
-
MCT:August 24, 2008
Deeply unique and sad. Breathtakingly refreshing at the same time. In this day and age when film has been watered down and spelled out, Atonement provides an engaging and sometimes tense story of two lovers that just want to find a way back to each other but cannot. It is a classic.
-
MCT:August 24, 2008
I really liked this one. It was blunt and harsh, and terribly heart breaking, but it was brilliant. Keira's stark outfits and dark locks went really well together, and of course I disliked Briony from the very beginning, though I guess that's to be expected, with all the meddling she did.
-
MCT:August 23, 2008
Pinches your heart until you burst into tears. Joe Wright's direction entertains you throughout, the score of Dario Marianelli gives rise to the tensions, and the convincing performances of the entire cast just won't let your attention float adrift.
-
MCT:August 21, 2008
surprisingly--my husband LOVED IT more than i did...gotta love a movie that rips ur guts out and makes u sick with agony.
-
MCT:August 20, 2008
Jealousy and deceit ravage a family and a couple in love during the second World War when a young girl accuses her older sister's lover of a crime he did not commit. A lovely adaption.
-
MCT:August 20, 2008
This movie is so good. Keira and James do sooo good together. Warning, this movie is terribly sad, and you wonder how Bryony can live with herself after what she did.
-
MCT:August 19, 2008
What a wonderful movie. This kept me enthralled right from beginning till end. Fantastic pace, great cinematography and wonderful use of music. The scene at Dunkirk was so well done, and really moved me. Saoirse Ronan was wonderful as Briony, and more than deserved her Oscar nomination. Also, this movie surprised me - I was not expecting that ending, and yes, it made me cry!
-
MCT:August 18, 2008
I thought that this movie was terrific. It is a really great movie.
If you have not seen it yet, you must! -
MCT:August 18, 2008
The beginning was very gripping and I loved the great camera angles and fantastic music. It was a bit different to the book but I guess that made it more exciting because I didn't know what was going to happen. The acting was fantastic, no faults in that. The only fault was that at some parts I felt missed a whole chunk of the book out which would have made it harder to understand if I had not already read the book. Missed out some important things.
-
MCT:August 17, 2008if you need a good cry this is it. not a typical ending- at first i was annoyed by the ending but in retrospect it was the right ending. good movie
-
MCT:August 17, 2008
It's a beautiful movie, in every possible ways. I'm totally in love with it. Beautiful picture & soundtrack.
-
MCT:August 17, 2008
In England in 1935, precocious 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) lives on her family's country estate with her mother and sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley). Cecilia is home for the summer from Cambrige where she had been studying with the housekeeper's son, Robbie (James McAvoy). She and Robbie have an uncertain relationship; neither is willing to act on it but a certain romantic chemistry exists between them. One day, Briony sees from her bedroom window an argument between Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain. Robbie accidentally broke an antique vase and a piece of it fell into the fountain. Angrily, Cecilia stripped to her underwear and dove into the fountain to retrieve it. Briony is confused about the sexual tension between the two of them.
The Tallises are being visited by young relatives from the north -- the twins Pierrot and Jackson (Felix and Charlie von Simsin) and their 15-year-old sister, Lola (Juno Temple), whose parents are in the process of divorcing. Leon Tallis (Patrick Kennedy) brings his friend Paul (Benedict Cumberbatch) for dinner. Paul keenly follows Hitler's political advance and predicts war. He plans to sell chocolate bars to the British military to give to their soldiers. While he tries to amuse Pierrot and Jackson, Paul and Lola flirt.
Embarrassed by his behavior earlier in the day, Robbie tries to write an apology note to Cecilia. One of the drafts includes a sexually charged declaration of his love for her. He then writes a more formal apology he intends to deliver to her. However, he accidentally gives the sexual note to Briony while walking to dinner at the Tallises that night; he gives her the note because he believes it will be less embarrassing if it comes from Briony instead of him. When he realizes what he has done, he calls out to Briony but she is too far away to hear him. Back in the house, she reads the note and is scandalized. She gives the note to Cecilia but later confides to Lola that she believes Robbie is a dangerous sex maniac. Lola has come to her with arm bruises that she accuses her twin brothers of giving to her but Briony ignores them.
Robbie arrives for dinner. He and Cecilia discuss the note and admit their love for one another. They make passionate love in the library but are discovered by Briony. At dinner, it is discovered that Pierrot and Jackson have run away. Everyone looks for them. While looking for them by a creek, Briony stumbles on Lola being raped by someone. He runs away into the darkness. Briony insists to first Lola and then the police that Robbie was the culprit and brandishes the sexual letter to Cecilia as evidence. Only Cecilia protests his innocence. When Robbie returns with the twins, he is arrested for rape. Tried and convicted, he is sent to prison. Four years later he is released into the British army and makes up part of the British Expeditionary Force that is sent to northern France in an attempt to halt the Nazi advance.
In northern France, Robbie and two fellow soldiers attempt to make their way to Dunkirk, where the remnants of the BEF are to be evacuated after the Nazis rout their forces and the French. He has a shrapnel wound in his chest. Several weeks earlier, before he left London, he saw Cecilia again. She remained true to him for four years and begs him to come back to her. She reveals that she has broken contact with her family over her love for Robbie and belief in his innocence. She gives him a photograph of a seaside cottage near Dover that they can retire to. It will give him strength as he struggles towards Dunkirk. Cecilia is a nurse in London. She learns that Briony, now 18 (Romola Garai) has decided not to study at Cambridge and is training to be a nurse herself. Briony knows that Robbie did not rape Lola, that it was Paul -- to whom Lola is now engaged and who has become a millionaire selling his candy to the British army. Briony goes to see Cecilia to admit her guilt and state her willingness to do whatever it takes to atone for her sins and clear Robbie's name. Robbie is in Cecilia's apartment when she gets there. Although they are angry with her, they tell her what she needs to do to make things right. She agrees, then leaves as Cecilia and Robbie are intimate for one last time before he is shipped to France with the BEF.
In 1999, Briony (Vanessa Redgrave), now in her late seventies and dying of vascular dementia, is a famous novelist. Her new book, __Atonement__, will be published on her birthday. The foregoing narrative had been one she created for her book, as an act of atonement for what she did to Robbie and Cecilia. In real life, she never saw Cecilia after she left the family, and Cecilia and Robbie never had a last tender moment in her apartment before he left with the BEF. Instead, he died at Dunkirk of septicemia, waiting to be evacuated. Cecilia died a few months later when a German bomb burst a water main and flooded the subway tunnel in which she and other Londoners had taken refuge during the Blitz. Briony hopes that, by reuniting them, she gives them the happy conclusion to their lives that they deserved and her readers the hope that everyone needs to survive.
Robbie and Cecilia walk down the beach on a bright, beautiful day. On the steps of the seaside cottage, they look at the beautiful white cliffs, then disappear inside.
Joe Wright, the BAFTA Award-winning director of Pride & Prejudice, has reunited with his filmmaking team and his Academy Award-nominated actress, Keira Knightley, for another classic British romance, starring James McAvoy (BAFTA Award nominee for The Last King of Scotland) opposite Ms. Knightley. Christopher Hampton (Academy Award winner for Dangerous Liaisons) has written the screenplay adaptation of Ian McEwans best-selling 2002 novel Atonement. Shot on location in the U.K., the films story spans several decades. In 1935, 13-year-old fledgling writer Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) and her family live a life of wealth and privilege in their enormous mansion. On the warmest day of the year, the country estate takes on an unsettling hothouse atmosphere, stoking Brionys vivid imagination. Robbie Turner (Mr. McAvoy), the educated son of the familys housekeeper, carries a torch for Brionys headstrong older sister Cecilia (Ms. Knightley). Cecilia, he hopes, has comparable feelings; all it will take is one spark for this relationship to combust. When it does, Briony who has a crush on Robbie is compelled to interfere, going so far as accusing Robbie of a crime he did not commit. Cecilia and Robbie declare their love for each other, but he is arrested and with Briony bearing false witness, the course of three lives is changed forever. Briony continues to seek forgiveness for her childhood misdeed. Through a terrible and courageous act of imagination, she finds the path to her uncertain atonement, and to an understanding of the power of enduring love. -
MCT:August 16, 2008
Joe Wright's follow-up to his 2005 version of Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" (also starring Keira Knightley) is sure-fire Oscar bait in just about the best possible use of that term. Knightley stars as Cecilia Tallis, a well-to-do daughter of an Anglo-Saxon family in the British countryside in 1935. She's carrying on a flirtatious relationship one summer with Robbie the groundskeeper (James McAvoy). When Cecilia's impressionable and imaginative aspiring writer of a younger sister, 13 year-old Briony (a magnificent newcomer: Saoirse Ronan) witnesses a crime against her young cousin, various bits of circumstantial evidence lead her to tell an unforgivable (though not unimaginable) lie, misinterpreting things every step of the way, and this results in Robbie being sent to prison, thus separated from his (potential) paramour... The film flashes forward 4 years and takes us w/Robbie and the siblings into World War I. He goes to fight for his country, leading to a REMARKABLE and CLASSIC tracking shot at the beach at Dunkirk, and for a few beautiful minutes, this film is gorgeously off and away. If there's a problem with Wright and Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Ian McEwan's much-beloved novel, it's that every time they cut to the romance angle, you want to go back to Briony's perspective, as this is ultimately a story about a little girl who sees something she doesn't understand (it's even there in the dialogue!) and who only later gets what she saw and what a big mistake she made (as a wiser, if flawed, young woman, she's played by the wonderful Romola Garai), Wright employs similar lateral tracking shots early on much like he did in his earlier film, giving the early-going proceedings a weightlessness that is breathtaking from a cinematic point-of-view. He also employs an intriguing technique in which he draws us in by first showing us Briony's perspective of events and then the "adult" perspective, thus shedding a new context on a misunderstood happening. This serves to exquisitely illustrate exactly what this story is really about. Hampton's screenplay is a gorgeously constructed and beautifully written (if emotionally stilted) work which has an elegance of language that is refreshing in this day and age of clipped, tight dialogue and spelled-out plot points. It's a clever, sometimes witty work that ranks with the best writing of the year. Ronan is a revelation as Briony, as are the always lovely Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave as the respective older nurse version and, ultimately, aging novelist version of the girl. The film is not perfect, but when it's working, it's working, and that's hard to beat these days. Terrific filmmaking!
-
MCT:August 16, 2008
beautifull.. beautifull in making,beautiful in music, beautifull in phhotography and excellent scrreenplay
-
MCT:August 15, 2008
Oh my gosh what a good movie. It is so shocking and brilliantly directed and the love story mixed in is so sincere and touching. It proves what happens when people spread rumors.
-
MCT:August 15, 2008
An amazing story, really good acting and great artistic value with beautiful music and outstanding images. I loved it, in all its sadness. The ending was brilliant.
-
MCT:August 15, 2008
'Atonement' is a glorious book adaptation, classical in style and presentation, yet shocking and innovative in plot and content. It is beautiful and graceful in delivery, but embodies startling tragedy for a period-theme. I haven't read McEwan's novel, but the film certainly pushes me to give it a try; and romance is far from my favourite genre - not that 'Atonement's generic roots can be so strictly defined.
The plot revolves around a forbidden romance, and how one lie from a young girl who misunderstands a series of situations not meant for her perception result in incomprehensible tragedy for three lives. It may sound tongue-tied, but Wright's clever narrative techniques make for easy and more satisfying viewing. He understands the consequences of misinterpretation, and how uncomplicated it is to arise at your most preferred conclusion.
Keira Knightley and James McAvoy deliver outstanding performances, pitch-perfect in every scene, and are supported by a brilliant thirteen year old Soiarse Ronan; all three exude regret and become one with their characters, embracing the film's style and never faltering. The aesthetics of the film are also as classy as they come - the costume is certainly noticeable, but it's the fantastic score that impresses most, using an overlay of tapping typewriter keys to emphasise the literary subtext.
'Atonement' isn't as coherent as Wright's previous 'Pride and Prejudice', but it has far more sophisticated direction, as though he is now fully comfortable in his place; more confident, more daring. As we witness an older Briony (a subtle and nuanced Romola Garai) working as a nurse to help with the war effort, pacing is too often in danger of dragging.
For the first act, however, opening in a 1930's country estate, Wright introduces characters and lets the plot unfold with an essence of pure bliss, an atmosphere that becomes an awful shame to depart from; the vivid cinematography and strong sense of fluency make this the most satisfying section of the film. During a montage of Cecelia and Robbie alternately pondering over potential decisions, Wright employs the use of smoke, music and mirrors to add a stylish breath to what could easily have been a stuffy and overworked segment of the film.
The second act is just as impressive; the full extent of the war is portrayed with a harrowing sensitivity and amazing direction. One uncut shot of almost five minutes at the beach of the evacuation of Dunkirk highlights skilful direction and hits with a saddening resonance.
Some dislike the ending, but it is probably the film's most affecting moment. Thanks to a star-turn by Vanessa Redgrave and Wright balancing moving dialogue and great story-telling, the final act manages to illustrates the extreme and utter sense of loss, waste and tragedy a single lie can cause, but how it can, perhaps, be redeemed by kindness, more than anything - even truth. -
MCT:August 9, 2008it has nothing good but its music.
just don`t waste ur time watchin` it,instead of that go buy its original soundtrack. -
MCT:August 6, 2008I dunno. It wasn't nearly what I expected it to be, and the ending was lame. James McAvoy was good, but Keira Knightley looked like a freshly made-up corpse throughout most of it and the story wasn't nearly as tragic as the trailers made it out to be. Not to mention the weird timeline jump-around that was going on through the whole thing. Disappointing. I wish I'd waited for cable.
My Friends Said...
Atonement Recent Reviews
Register or sign-in to see your friends' reviews !
Comments
-
riseandfall2000posted 113 days ago -
-
-
Atonement deserved the oscar more than no country for old men.
Keira knightly has acted well, so did James mcavoy and others.posted 134 days ago -
This was good i thought - a bit confusing at first the way it went from the past to the present - but I soon got use to that.. How very sad that Robbie and Cecillia didn't end up togther and that they both died way before there time.... good story - but tragic
posted 140 days ago -
-
Saw it on DVD, and I LOVE IT. James McAvoy, and Keira Knightley in the same movie is THE best. Soairse, first time I've seen her, and she was soo good. Sad, but beautiful.
posted 157 days ago -
cannot wait for this film! it has yet to come to my town, but i bought the soundtrack, and it is riveting. keira knightley is beautiful, and i'm curious to see her do a love scene with "mr. tumnus"
posted 206 days ago -
Masterpiece of colors and sounds, which along the actors perfectly portrays tragedy that spreads without ending and destroys lives of people webbed into it.
Simply brilliant!posted 233 days ago -
After reading McEwans novel ( which is one of the best i've read) i was highly doubting that a film could be made that would compliment the novel,however i knew from the moment Joe Wright was announced the director that the film would be spectacular as he had already done an amazing adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. After seeing the film i was astounded and emotionally moved by the piece which totally outran all of my expectations. Once again Wright had brought out the best acting from Keira and proven to the public how good McAvoy really is. The music is beautiful from marianelli and definatley plays a huge part in expressing the characters emotions ( that's why i bought it). In all this film is a definate must see, it certaintly gets my five stars!
posted 239 days ago
