Film Review – All the Old Knives

Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton are offered an acting showcase with “All the Old Knives.” It’s a spy game from author Olen Steinhauer, who adapts his own 2015 novel for the screen, put in charge of transferring a character study that has a lot of room to roam on the page. As a film, the endeavor isn’t quite as deep or all that riveting, finding director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe”) struggling to make something interesting happen with a story that slowly explores the growth of suspicion between two characters who once enjoyed blissful intimacy. “All the Old Knives” makes room for Pine and Newton to do what they can with the deliberate mood of the feature, but what’s imagined as a psychological chess game between two prepared players gradually runs out of moves, straining to find a powerful sense of closure while the rest of the movie periodically comes to a full stop. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com