The film begins with elderly Joan Stanley (Dench) opening the door to police officers who reveal that, following the death of a diplomat, she is to be charged with leaking atomic secrets to the Russians in the years after the second World War. Adapted from a novel by Jennie Rooney, Red Joan gestures towards the true story of the Soviet spy Melita Norwood. It takes a quality – not a gift exactly, but a quality – to make something so boring of such a fascinating subject. It's taken another 20 to rope Judi Dench, an old collaborator, into a film that deserves note for all the wrong reasons. A decade after that, he delivered a mechanical take on Twelfth Night that smelt so strongly of greasepaint that one needed a little lie down afterwards. It's more than 30 years since he directed Helena Bonham Carter in a famously narcoleptic study of Lady Jane Grey. Trevor Nunn's cinematic career has – let us put this politely – failed to generate the same acclaim as his work for the theatre.
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