Movie Trailers

• Directors: Peter Jackson
• Producers: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Carolynne Cunningham, Executive producer, Steven Spielberg
• Writers: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Novel, Alice Sebold
• Genres: Drama, Horror, Thriller
• Actors: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Michael Imperioli

On December 6 1973, fourteen year old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is raped and murdered by a neighbor, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), a serial killer of young girls and women. Susie finds herself in ‘the in-between’ – a Heaven-like place, observing her family as they grieve for her. She also watches her killer who, having covered his tracks successfully, is preparing to murder again. Her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) is trying to figure out who murdered Susie. He has the pieces, but he can’t fit them together. Susie struggles to balance her desire for vengeance on Harvey and her desire to have her family recover from their loss.[4]

• Directors: Gil Kenan
• Producers: Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman
• Writers: Jeanne Duprau, Caroline Thompson
• Genres: Adventure, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
• Actors: Bill Murray, Saoirse Ronan, Harry Treadaway, Mackenzie Crook

The movie introduction explains that the City of Ember is a fully-contained city built underground to house a human community for 200 years as a shelter from an unspecified disaster. A box has been provided which automatically opens after 200 years, and contains a tool and instructions for returning to the surface. Mayors of Ember keep the box a secret and only disclose its existence to their successors in office. When a mayor suddenly dies while still in office, the box is put in a closet in Lina’s house and unnoticed by anyone when it automatically opens as designed.

Some decades later Ember’s food supplies are becoming depleted and blackouts are increasingly frequent and longer-lasting, as the hydroelectric generator that powers the city has deteriorated. Much of the knowledge and technology from the city’s near-mythic Builders and earlier generations has been lost.

Two young friends, Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) are graduating from school. Lina is assigned to work in the Pipeworks of the hydroelectric generator, but trades jobs with Doon, who does not like his assignment to work as messenger. Lina witnesses the city’s decay as she relays messages, and Doon learns that the Pipeworks are held together with increasing amounts of patchwork. Nobody knows in detail how any of the city’s systems work. After a major malfunction of the generator during the city’s annual celebration, Lina and Doon conclude that Ember is in danger of imminent collapse. With the city’s adult population either largely ignorant of their plight or cowed by the corrupt Mayor Cole (Bill Murray), Lina and Doon search for the clues left by the Builders showing the citizens of Ember how to save themselves.

…

Indeed, Lina has the box in her home and has begun to understand its importance. While the mayor eats food, he accuses her that he steals food from Ember. Lina jumps the table stealing the second card while the blackouts occur. The pair escapes and tries to find their way out of the city with the instructions left in the box by the Builders, and receive unexpected assistance from Doon’s elderly mentor Sul (Martin Landau). Meanwhile, Mayor Cole goes to his bunker and he died by a giant star-nosed mole. Arriving at the surface they are initially disappointed that it is dark there as well, as described in Ember’s folklore, but when the sun rises they discover that light has returned to the skies and the planet has recovered. They also see through a hole the lights of Ember deep below the surface and realize they had lived in an underground city. Lina and Doon drop a message tied to a rock through the hole down to Ember telling the other citizens how to leave the city, where it is found by Loris Harrow (Tim Robbins), Doon’s father and one of the few adults aware of the city’s serious situation.

• Directors: Joe Wright 1
• Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Paul Webster 1
• Writers: Novel, Ian McEwan, Screenplay, Christopher Hampton
• Genres: Drama, Mystery, Romance, War
• Actors: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave

The film comprises four parts, corresponding to the four parts of the novel. Some scenes are shown several times from different perspectives.

Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is a 13-year-old girl from a wealthy English family, the youngest of three, and an aspiring writer. Her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is educated at Cambridge University alongside Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of their housekeeper (Brenda Blethyn), whose school fees are paid by Cecilia’s father. Though Robbie is headed for medical school soon, he is spending the summer gardening on the Tallis estate. The ginger-haired Lola Quincey (Juno Temple), age fifteen, and her younger twin brothers, Jackson and Pierrot (Felix and Charlie von Simson), are cousins of Briony and Cecilia who are visiting the family amidst their parents’ divorce. Lastly, Leon (Patrick Kennedy) â€“ Briony and Cecilia’s brother â€“ brings home a friend named Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch), who owns a chocolate factory that is acquiring a contract to produce army rations. The Tallis family is planning a special dinner, to which Leon happily invites Robbie, who accepts, much to Cecilia’s annoyance.

Briony has just finished writing a play entitled The Trials of Arabella, which she describes being as about “the complications of love”.[4] Her cousins, however, are being unmanageable about staging the play, and she is considerably frustrated. Alone in her bedroom, she witnesses a significant moment of sexual tension between Robbie and her sister by the fountain, when her sister strips down to her underwear and dips into the fountain, to retrieve the lost part of a vase that Robbie has clumsily broken. Because Briony cannot hear what the two are saying, and has witnessed only a fraction of the scene, she misunderstands its dynamics, and the seed of her misplaced distrust in Robbie is sown.

…

The film suddenly shifts forward to 1999, when an elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave), interviewed on television (by Anthony Minghella) about her latest novel Atonement, is overcome with emotion and memory. She reveals that she is dying of vascular dementia, and that this novel will be her last, but that it is also her first, as she has been drafting it intermittently since her time at St Thomas’s. Briony admits that the story is autobiographical and expresses great remorse at her actions. She admits that the end of the novel is, in fact, a fiction; in reality, both Robbie and Cecilia died before Briony could make amends, Robbie succumbing to septicemia the day before the evacuation at Dunkirk, and Cecilia perishing in the Ballham Tube Station flooding. Briony explains that she has altered the ending to give her sister and Robbie the chance at the happiness they both deserved, and which she took away from them. The film closes with a scene of a simple, seaside bliss between Cecilia and Robbie, together at long last. The scenery of the English cliff-side beach around them echoes that from a postcard that Cecilia gave Robbie on his departure for duty, as a promise that they would be together someday.