Atonement

Atonement is a 2007 romantic war drama film directed by Joe Wright and starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave. It is based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Ian McEwan. The film chronicles a crime and its consequences over the course of six decades, beginning in the 1930s. It was produced for StudioCanal and filmed in England. Distributed in most of the world by Universal Studios, it was released theatrically in the United Kingdom on 7 September 2007 and in North America on 7 December 2007. Atonement opened both the 2007 Vancouver International Film Festival and the 64th Venice International Film Festival, making Wright, at age 35, the youngest director ever to open the Venice event. The film was a commercial success and earned a worldwide gross of approximately $129 million against a budget of $30 million. It received rave reviews, with critics praising its acting, emotional depth, Wright's direction, Dario Marianelli's score, the cinematography, editing, visuals and the film's incorporation of real life events. Atonement won an Oscar for Best Original Score at the 80th Academy Awards and was nominated for six others, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for Ronan. It also garnered fourteen nominations at the 61st British Academy Film Awards, winning both Best Film and Production Design, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama. Plot In 1935 England, 13-year-old Briony Tallis, the youngest daughter of the wealthy Tallis family, is set to perform a play she wrote for an upcoming family gathering. She spies on her older sister, Cecilia, and the housekeeper's son, Robbie Turner (with whom Briony is infatuated), from her bedroom window. During their (Cecilia's and Robbie's) argument by the garden fountain, Robbie accidentally breaks a vase and yells at Cecilia to stay where she is – so as to avoid cutting her feet on the broken pieces on the ground. Still angered, Cecilia then strips off her outer clothing, stares at him and climbs into the fountain to retrieve one of the pieces. Briony observes all this from the window, and misinterprets the relationship between Cecilia and Robbie.