Parents' Guide to Official Secrets

Wordy, disjointed, and not exactly dynamic or visual, this fact-based political drama nonetheless gets by on sheer righteous anger, painful relevance, and a few stand-up-and-cheer moments. Official Secrets gets a large portion of its strength from Knightley, whose Katharine is seen early on during her free time shouting at Tony Blair on TV. She must sell a character who's beholden to her better instincts, and suffers to the point that she would put herself and her husband in danger to set things right; Knightley does this admirably.

Directed by Gavin Hood (who doesn't quite reach the highs of his Eye in the Sky), the movie does spend long chunks away from Katharine. But fortunately, it sometimes turns into a crackling newspaper movie, with Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans, and Matt Smith filling out the requisite colorful journalist roles. While the film struggles to make memos and meetings and editing decisions into cinema -- and struggles equally with half-baked, ill-placed attempts at suspense -- Official Secrets regularly rediscovers threads of tension and keeps things moving, and Fiennes' late-entry performance helps carry the story ably toward the finale.