Atonement

Joe Wright's Atonement opened in 2007, three years after his Pride & Prejudice, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Score (Dario Marianelli) and the BAFTA for Best Film. Adapted by Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan's 2001 Booker-shortlisted novel (widely considered McEwan's finest work) the film became one of the most internationally successful British literary adaptations of its decade and consolidated Saoirse Ronan, then thirteen, as a child performer of unusual seriousness.

1935, Surrey. Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis (Ronan, in her breakthrough role) misinterprets a sequence of moments she half-witnesses between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and the housekeeper's son Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), and falsely accuses Robbie of a crime he did not commit. The film follows the consequences across the next decades, wartime hospital nursing in London, military service through the Dunkirk evacuation. Wright assembled a remarkable supporting ensemble around his young leads, with Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave among the standouts.

The film's most-cited sequence (a five-and-a-half-minute single-take Steadicam tracking shot through the chaos of the Dunkirk evacuation, choreographed across a thousand-strong crowd of extras on Redcar Beach) became one of the most-discussed bravura set-pieces of 2000s British cinema. Marianelli's Oscar-winning score, built around the percussive rhythm of typewriter keys, is among the most distinctive of its decade. The film consolidated Wright's literary-adaptation vein, which would extend into Anna Karenina (2012) and Darkest Hour (2017), and confirmed Christopher Hampton (long established as the screenwriter of Dangerous Liaisons) as the leading British adapter of his generation.