All The Old Knives' first reviews are in, teasing a classy, slow-burn spy drama.
Westworld's Thandiwe Newton and Wonder Woman's Chris Pine play two spies and former lovers linked to the 1985 hijacking of Royal Jordanian flight 127, which resulted in the deaths of everyone on board.
The pair talk about the events of decades prior over a meal, in particular the details of a traitor that led to the tragedy, but it soon becomes clear that one of them may not make it out of dinner alive.
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The movie directed by Danish filmmaker Janus Metz Pedersen has currently a 72% score on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. While some critics appreciated the slow pace of the film and its different approach to a spy story, others felt it lacked substance.
Leah Greenblatt at Entertainment Weekly described it as "an urbane thriller calibrated for slow burns and analog attention spans".
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Greenblatt added: "The elegant but ambiguous result often feels caught between ideas and execution – a Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with more sex and less sense, brushing up against the deeper, more satisfying film that might have been.
The Washington Post critic Micheal O'Sullivan praised the mental game played by the two protagonists, likening it to a tennis match and citing a number of twists as "pretty good surprise(s)", while Variety called it "a minor but engrossing genre movie".
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Peter Bradshaw, film critic for The Guardian, recognised in the film – an adaptation of a novel from Olen Steinhauer, who also penned the script – a multi-theme common to many a successful spy story.
"It is the classic Le Carré conflation of three different sorts of betrayal: personal, professional and patriotic," he wrote.
Alongside Newton and Pine, the film also stars The Matrix star Laurence Fishburn and Game of Thrones actor Jonathan Pryce.
All the Old Knives is set to have a limited release in the UK and US and will be out on Amazon Prime Video from April 8.
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Stefania is a freelance writer specialising in TV and movies. After graduating from City University, London, she covered LGBTQ+ news and pursued a career in entertainment journalism, with her work appearing in outlets including Little White Lies, The Skinny, Radio Times and Digital Spy.
Her beats are horror films and period dramas, especially if fronted by queer women. She can argue why Scream is the best slasher in four languages (and a half).
