Dead good. Go and see it.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to see a smart film, and—don’t get me wrong—dumb films can be really fantastic fun. (I’m even looking forward to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.) But sometimes it’s nice to get your cinematic teeth into a bit of film that makes you think. (That doesn’t read quite right… You know what I mean.)

This one has some smashing acting, a plot which actually makes sense and in places is genuinely moving. It’s not often that a mainstream Holywood movie even touches on African genocide—or any other kind of genocide, (except obliquely, when there happen to be some stock Nazis bobbing around)— for example. Or that could even consider featuring the United Nations and not make you yawn, but this film manages both.

And I feel that I ought to vaguely disapprove of Nicole Kidman somehow… but she’s utterly convincing in this, a central character who is morally ambiguous, rather cryptic, but completely sympathetic… and who doesn’t end up shagging the male lead at the quiet bit in the middle of the film, and this I felt lent the whole story a bit of credibility. (Not that people don’t have sex in real life, but the Rules of Holywood seem to demand that the leading man and leading lady fall in love, symbolised by a bit of screwing halfway through. And surely in real life, not everybody has sex in a crisis.)

So it felt real, it touched on serious actual Issues In The World Today without being preachy, it had a brilliant cast and it kept me interested and thinking. Thumbs up.