Synopsis
Read between the lies.
A writer stumbles upon a long-hidden secret when he agrees to help former British Prime Minister Adam Lang complete his memoirs on a remote island after the politician's assistant drowns in a mysterious accident.
2010 Directed by Roman Polanski
A writer stumbles upon a long-hidden secret when he agrees to help former British Prime Minister Adam Lang complete his memoirs on a remote island after the politician's assistant drowns in a mysterious accident.
Ewan McGregor Pierce Brosnan Kim Cattrall Olivia Williams Tom Wilkinson Timothy Hutton Jon Bernthal Tim Preece Robert Pugh David Rintoul Eli Wallach Jim Belushi Anna Botting Yvonne Tomlinson Milton Welsh Alister Mazzotti Tim Faraday Kate Copeland Soogi Kang Hong Thay Lee John Keogh Hans-Peter Sussner Stuart Austen Marianne Graffam Morgane Polanski Andy Gütig Robert Wallhöfer Glenn Conroy Robert Seeliger Show All…
R.P. Productions Studio Babelsberg Runteam France 2 Cinéma Summit Entertainment FFA Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg FilmFörderung Hamburg Mecklenburg Vorpommern France Télévisions Bogard 321 Films R.P. Films Elfte Babelsberg Film GmbH Runteam III Ltd. Pathé StudioCanal
The Ghost, Ghost Writer, L'écrivain fantôme, Nhà Văn Ma, L'uomo nell'ombra, Der Ghostwriter, Muž ve stínu, O Escritor Fantasma, Skyggen, Szellemíró, Призрак, Hayalet Yazar, El Escritor, 影子写手, Autor widmo, סופר הצללים, Αόρατος Συγγραφέας, ゴーストライター, 유령 작가, Marioneta, Pisatelj v senci, Примара, 獵殺幽靈寫手, Писател в сянка, Muž v tieni, El escritor oculto, Vaiduoklis, SKYGGEN, უჩინარი მწერალი, Прывід пяра, 影子滅殺令, พลิกปริศนา สภาซ่อนเงื่อน, Người Chấp Bút, L'escriptor
High speed and special ops Thrillers and murder mysteries Politics and human rights Exciting spy thrillers with tense intrigue Politics, propaganda, and political documentaries Intense political and terrorist thrillers Riveting political and presidential drama Intriguing and suspenseful murder mysteries Show All…
I wonder if Polanski identified with the Tony Blair (Brosnan) character, specifically the scene where he is told he needs to stick to countries that don’t have extradition treaties.
Duplicities and political actors, the multi-million-dollar memoir as metaphor for a geopolitics controlled by obscure interests and ghost writers. Apart from a couple of VFX shots, this is close to perfect in terms of craft and atmosphere and just might be the best film Polanski made after the ‘70s: tightly paced, terrifically cast, expertly manipulated. Hadn’t seen it in eight or nine years, but was surprised how many lines of dialogue I remembered right down to the inflection.
Carrying a very mysterious vibe from its opening moments, full of twists n turns throughout its runtime & benefiting greatly from Alexandre Desplat's sensational score, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer is a finely crafted & nicely performed political drama that's narrated in a highly controlled manner yet turns out to be slightly underwhelming in the end.
Based on Robert Harris' novel, the story of The Ghost Writer concerns a nameless ghostwriter who's hired to complete the memoirs of a former Prime Minister of United Kingdom, after the untimely death of the writer who was previously assigned the same job. The plot covers his efforts as he tries to connect different pieces of the same puzzle to uncover a secret that changes everything.…
My parents were livid at the ending of this movie, but I thought it was very......impactful 😏
In a quick — really quick — bit McGregor’s trying to hail this cab, struggling, and raises his outstretched arm so slightly, with equal brevity; the camera lifts in concert with his body, effort, timing. Which it doesn’t need to, it’s not that urgent a cab-ride — little’s urgent to this character until it’s inevitably, invariably too late — and anyway we’re resituated in the medium two-shot after maybe not even one second.
It’s playful but not cute, amusing but not funny — a smidge funny, but not funny-ha-ha. It’s neither a synecdoche for the movie in toto nor should it technically inform whatever follows, except to say that few — really few — directors would bother with this gesture, fewer would have even the slightest chance convincing you it’s germane to anything.
That’s Polanski.
Polanski’s seeming retreat from authorship doubles as an escape into airport-paperback fiction and ghostwritten memoir, though this compulsively watchable pulp thriller requires neither anti-Blair politics nor life/art subtext to function. “Nothing,” after all, is what Ewan McGregor’s unnamed hack writer offers in order to snag this particular job. From there, it’s off to a secluded island—nominally Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, but really a mix of a Berlin soundstage and the island of Sylt in the North Sea—a space as artificial as that of Death and the Maiden (a film with its own personal-political reckoning), but now it’s all oppressively modernist spaces, tones of cobalt and slate, and perpetually stormy skies. Possibly the leanest 128 minutes of the decade, filled with utterly…
Still the best straight thriller of the 21st century, uncut and unapologetic airport fiction. My aesthetic, admittedly: graphite toned and streaked with rain, cruel, boozy. The political window dressing has aged a little more poorly than I might have imagined (a powerful man nearly held to account for his sins!?) but it matters not very much. This is the purest of Polanski’s Oedipus myths, untarnished by Freud or needless subtext. Knowledge is death.
The real world counterpart to The Ninth Gate's Luciferian allegory: the cruelest, most deceitful evils are born from the highest of power networks. Formally pristine, crystalline.
When Quentin Tarantino made Once Upon A Time In Hollywood he took a couple of pot shots at a genuine icon and a filmmaker with a, let's call it, a chequered past. Cliff Booth helped ruin Bruce Lee's iconic status, at least for me, but Quentin seemed to have Roman Polanski's number right from the get-go. I'm not going to defend Polanski's reputation away from behind a movie-camera, it would appear he has appetites that would and should have had him sharing a cell with those who murdered his young wife back in 1969. As a filmmaker however, he knows what he's doing, he's won Awards aplenty, and although the #MeToo movement has recently brought the various allegations against him…