Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThe streaming era, with its glut of viewing options and its omnipresent yet thinly spread advertising, often makes it harder for audiences to get an advance read on a movie.
When you see that a couple of actors as good as Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton have teamed up for a spy thriller that’s being released by Amazon Studios, and that it’s called “All the Old Knives” (a title that sounds like it could be about anything or nothing), you wonder — a little more than you might have 30 years ago — if it’s a project that makes good on their talents or whether it’s another ho-hum slab of product. (Ho-hum product has always been with us; but there’s more of it now.)So I’m glad to report that “All the Old Knives” is a minor but engrossing genre movie: tightly wound, more or less rooted in the real world, with taut dialogue and espionage gambits that fall just this side of contrived.
It’s not John le Carré, but it’s not thinly patched together pulp either. Watching “All the Old Knives,” you never forget why Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton (warning!
dated term coming) are movie stars. The film jumps back and forth between a couple of time periods and settings, and while in some thrillers that kind of thing can be annoying — a way of goosing inert action — in this one, the director, Janus Metz (the former documentarian who made 2017’s “Borg vs.
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