IT may just be coincidence but towards the end of the film, writer-director Anthony Minghella makes a cameo appearance.

This serves as a reminder that Atonement, just like his own Oscarwinning The English Patient, belongs to that classy Brit-lit genre.

As a movie, Atonement is better than that Oscar-winner and an armful of awards would seem inevitable. Director Joe Wright certainly deserves one, having done wonders with an emotionally complex movie.

Christopher Hampton has adapted Ian McEwan's Booker Prize shortlisted novel and it can't have been easy from what people say (I haven't read it so am unwilling to pass judgement).

If nothing else, Wright can be credited as the man who proves that Keira Knightley can act. Those who've doubted that (include me) will be forced to eat their words on seeing her as Cecilia, first encountered in the mid-1930s and with her cut glass vowels, a dead ringer for Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.

She's engaged in a teasing relationship with socially-inferior Robbie (James McAvoy), who's education has been paid for by the master of the house. There's an obvious attraction, as her younger sister Briony (Saorise Ronan, then Romola Gari and finally, in old age, Vanessa Redgrave) notices. But it's the 13-year-old Briony's imagination which is responsible for ruining a good few lives.

In the middle of the emotional turmoil comes the scene that will go down in cinematic history - the sequence for which Redcar beach and seafront was turned into Dunkirk, filled with thousands of extras as soldiers assembling for the evacuation during the Second World War. Wright's epic fiveminute tracking shot along the crowded beach has already been described as "the scene of the year".

It's a masterpiece of detail as the camera skims past soldiers, civilians and animals waiting for the great escape from the advancing Germans. If you look carefully, you'll even see a man hanging off the big wheel in the background.

It's an amazing sequence in a movie that shows Wright can inbue a potentially stiff and formal situation into an emotional maelstrom.

Stars: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Saoirse Ronan, Vanessa Redgrave, Benedict Cumberpath
Running time: 123 mins
Rating: Four stars