Word: sleuthed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Memorandum, Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Handmaid's Tale - into parables of class inequity and betrayed alliances. (He also did a starchy version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and, for his last script, an ugly botch of the Anthony Shaffer thriller Sleuth.) He directed other men's plays, notably Simon Gray's (Butley), and appeared frequently onstage and screen. The man kept busy...
...Cold War. But the new boom market was different; KGB agents weren't likely to blow themselves up to make a political point, and the middle-class whites in the CIA couldn't easily pass for Arabs to infiltrate an al-Qaeda cell. Ferris makes use of locals to sleuth out information. But he and Hoffman have a bigger, wilder plan. The notion is to plant incriminating data on a plausible corpse and create a fictional CIA spy who the terrorists will believe has penetrated their ring. (British intelligence hatched this idea in 1943 for an anti-Germany caper that...
...have much of an excuse—this is hardly Branagh’s first foray into directing. His credits include “Hamlet” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” both well-received by critics. But in “Sleuth,” his attempts at creativity go over the top and miss opportunities to connect with his audience...
...What's clear from the opening shot of Branagh's version is that he desperately wants this Sleuth to be not the record of a play but a real, filmy film. Unfortunately, his notion of film is a combination of bizarre camera angles and an alternation of baffling long shots and punishing closeups. Once upon a time, Branagh directed some agreeable movies: the burly Henry V, the inventive Much Ado About Nothing. So I can't say his visual choices here are made from ignorance. They have to be called willfully stupid. The mise-en-scene becomes so aggressive that...
...viewer. I wouldn't necessarily put this film in the atrocity category of a lower-I.Q. torture exercise like Captivity. But if you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year...