In The Wan, Airless 'The Children Act,' A Judge Shows Poor Judgment
Emma Thompson stars as a British High Court judge who becomes embroiled in the life of a teenager brought before her, for reasons about which "it's hard to tell and harder to care."
As she moves through middle age, there's a whiff of acid in every Emma Thompson performance that adds a lively bump to the actress's Stateside image as an eternally flowering English Rose. The bracing asperity that juiced Thompson's self-directed turn as a warty governess in , as a bigoted headmistress in , as the neurotic author P. L. Travers in , now pops up in more subtle guise in , a near-fatally tasteful British drama adapted by Ian McEwan from his 2014 novel and directed by Richard Eyre.
