Official Secrets

Keira Knightley stars as Katharine Gun, a resolute British intelligence analyst in this dramatisation of events in the run-up to 2003's Iraq War. In the UK's GCHQ monitoring station an email from America's National Security Agency is circulated, requesting that the Brits help dig up some dirt the US could use to blackmail UN Security Council members into voting through a resolution authorising an attack on Saddam Hussein. Gun is so outraged by this request that she leaks the email in a valiant but doomed attempt to stop the conflict, and is charged under the Official Secrets Act. This has ramifications for her livelihood, her Kurdish-Turkish husband's ongoing asylum application, the journalists breaking the story and the lawyers defending her. Evidently, there's dramatic potential here, but with so much plot to explain, the human element of the story gets rather crowded out in favour of spy movie-type suspense. Knightley, though, brings genuine fire to her character's principled stand, and her inspiring commitment persuades us this historical footnote is definitely worth remembering.