Emmerson finds himself up against his former colleague Ken MacDonald (Jeremy Northam), whose career had taken him another way, becoming the director of public prosecutions and seeking to put Gun away. Gavin Hood’s robust and vehement intelligence thriller, taken from the true story of GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun (played by Keira Knightley), had Fiennes playing the human rights lawyer Ben Emmerson, who defended Gun. It is the kind of Fiennes’s performance that divides the Fiennes fans and non-fans: some love the soft-spoken sensitivity, others find it a bit wet.

Mikhail is shown to be complicit in a sneaky and dishonest plan to scare away his love rival, and Fiennes conveys all of Mikhail’s repressed sadness, repressed hope and repressed passion. Fiennes plays Mikhail, a gentle, cerebral and kindly man who has fallen hopelessly in love with a married woman, who is herself in love with someone else. Impressively, Fiennes mastered Russian dialogue for this intelligent adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country. Photograph: Allstar/Channel Four Films 18.

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