{"id":265425,"date":"2025-11-01T18:17:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T18:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/265425\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T18:17:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T18:17:12","slug":"lesley-manville-shows-her-mettle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/265425\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesley Manville Shows Her Mettle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAnyone who has seen her seething Oscar-nominated performance in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s \u201cPhantom Thread\u201d knows that Lesley Manville<\/a> can be hard as nails on screen \u2014 though it\u2019s a register the British veteran tends to play only in support, as her larger showcase roles, from \u201cAnother Year\u201d to \u201cMrs. Harris Goes to Paris,\u201d usually put more fragile vulnerability to the fore. That \u201cWinter of the Crow<\/a>\u201d places her front and center as a tough, resourceful protagonist in testing circumstances is reason enough to value Kasia Adamik<\/a>\u2018s taut, frostbitten Cold War thriller, though the film\u2019s pleasures extend beyond that one key casting coup.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe premise, on the face of it, is a familiar one, in line with dozens of political thrillers about hapless outsiders caught up in webs of systemic corruption. The setting is Warsaw in the winter of 1981, when Poland was placed under martial law by its communist government in an attempt to quash the rising pro-democratic Solidarity movement. Trapped in the process is Joan Andrews (Manville), a respected British psychology professor visiting the city\u2019s university for a guest lecture on the very weekend of this seismic turn of events \u2014 though she\u2019s not in any way a political player, her accidental witness status and potential access to foreign media place a major target on her back.<\/p>\n

\n\tA brisk, brittle type, married to her work and shown being somewhat high-handed with her colleagues in a brief, London-set preamble, Andrews takes early signs of disorder and unrest in Poland as a personal affront. When her luggage fails to turn up at Warsaw airport, she takes out her irritation on Alina (an excellent Zofia Wichlacz), the sharp young student and activist assigned as her assistant for the duration of her visit. Alina again takes the blame when Andrews\u2019 lecture that evening is rowdily disrupted by Solidarity student protesters: Revolution is little more than an inconvenience to the outsider, whose intellectual concerns don\u2019t extend to the political landscape of the country hosting her. Before the weekend is out, however, she\u2019ll be forced to pay more attention.<\/p>\n

\n\tPut up for the night not in a hotel but in a drab high-rise apartment belonging to Alina\u2019s parents \u2014 another point of annoyance \u2014 the piqued professor is instructed to await a morning pickup by Alina\u2019s brother, though he never arrives. Instead, she happens to witness and photograph a murder by the police, and narrowly escapes with her own life. Suddenly on the run, with no papers and her minders either dead or gone AWOL, Andrews must navigate her way to safety through a strange, blizzard-hit city suddenly under violent new management, with little way of telling friend from foe. Even a British ambassador, played with oily unreadability by the ever-welcome Tom Burke, isn\u2019t quite as straightforwardly comforting as you\u2019d hope.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a nervy waking nightmare, with our heroine\u2019s disorientation emphasized by the grainy charcoal textures of Tomasz Naumiuk\u2019s cinematography and Aleksandra Kierzkowska\u2019s superb, nicotine-stained production design \u2014 which combine to make early-Eighties Warsaw a scruffy Brutalist labyrinth in which even the right turns feel like wrong ones. The brutal December winter, meanwhile, earns its title billing, bearing down on the action with tangibly clammy force, shortening breath and tempers alike.<\/p>\n

\n\tAdapting a short story by Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Adamik and co-writers Lucinda Coxon and Sandra Buchta keep the action driving and urgent, and the characterisation spare \u2014 pretty much every figure here holds some degree of mystery, and that extends to Andrews herself, whose full capabilities (as well as previously hidden reserves of empathy) only emerge under extreme pressure. <\/p>\n

\n\tManville carries the film with an air of increasingly raw determination, the professor\u2019s entitlement and irritability giving way to unblinking self-preservation instincts when required. It\u2019s bracing to see the star at the centre of a story that would more commonly take the form of a wrong-man noir; like Emma Thompson in another frostily title thriller this year, \u201cDead of Winter,\u201d she demonstrates the underestimated power of a woman who\u2019s lived long enough to weather the cold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anyone who has seen her seething Oscar-nominated performance in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s \u201cPhantom Thread\u201d knows that Lesley Manville…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,142613,142614,206,142615],"class_list":["post-265425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-kasia-adamik","tag-lesley-manville","tag-movies","tag-winter-of-the-crow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}