Kate Beckinsale's hair is swept up when we meet her in her new movie “Nothing But the Truth,” Rod Lurie's original film about a journalist who refuses to reveal her sources. In real life, the British born actress wears her raven hair up too. The Oxford graduate with a degree in Russian and French does American so well onscreen, her accent comes as a surprise. On Thursday, at a special screening sponsored by Self Magazine -she graces the January cover-- she was joined by Sam Rockwell who pummeled her playfully with popcorn, Ben Gazzara, Dan Abrams (who plays himself in a cameo), Felicia Taylor, Morley Safer, Judith Miller (the NY Times reporter who is no stranger to this subject), and many others including her very pregnant co-star Vera Farmiga. You may remember her from a New York Times Magazine cover story, from Lynn Hirschberg's article about actresses who work steadily but are not well known. Of course that put this fine actress on everyone's radar, just in time for her performances in Anthony Minghella's “Breaking and Entering” and Martin Scorcese's Academy Award winning “The Departed.” Currently she plays a mom in “The Boy with the Striped Pajamas,” a fable about two little boys who forge a friendship from different sides of a concentration camp's barbed wire. In “Nothing But the Truth,” she's also a mom, and a CIA operative who is outed by Kate Beckinsale's character in a newspaper piece that almost wins the Pulitzer Prize. As a prosecuter paid to force her to speak, Matt Dillon is so vicious you want to hiss every time he appears. And here is the strength of this engrossing movie. That he does his job so well makes you reconsider what's at stake: integrity, first amendment rights, freedom of the press, justice, as well as the human concerns of compassion and good parenting. As these treasured values are challenged, Kate Beckinsale spends a lot of screen time in jail with her hair stringy and down.
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