Fresh from its success at the Venice Film Festival, the critics have cast their vote on Atonement and it's unanimous: the film is worth all the hype. The Times' critic Wendy Ide puts it simply: "award season beckons".
Telegraph critic Sukhdev Sandhu says the fomer Pride and Prejudice director Joe Wright "directs this period-hopping drama with a confidence and clarity of purpose absent from his stiff and excessively referential treatment of Jane Austen's novel". As for the controversial existence of Keira Knightly's acting ability, Sandhu finds that where she was "jejune and clumsy" in so many of her earlier films, she is now able to use "the veneer of hauteur to mask her tremulous feelings".
Our own Peter Bradshaw declares that the "gobsmacking sequence at Dunkirk in 1940 justifies the price of admission on its own", and lavishes Wright's direction with praise: "They say directing a film is like commanding an army. With his second feature film, 35-year-old Joe Wright has done more than enough to earn his general's uniform."
Only the Independent's Nicholas Barber is less bowled over than his fellow critics. Although he acknowledges that Atonement, riddled with love, war and class division, is pure Oscar bait, he seems to feel that the essence of McEwan's novel, which is concerned primarily with the process of writing and rewriting, is somehow lost using cinematic devices. With an army-issue chocolate bar analogy, he concludes that "Wright gives us a crisp, exquisitely moulded shell, but not enough chocolate". So what did you think?
