A misunderstanding, a mistake and an indiscretion lead a flighty 13-year-old girl to tell a lie that will permanently alter three lives in Best Picture Oscar-nominee "Atonement." 

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton not only blow the Merchant-Ivory dust off the British period movie, they transform Ian McEwan’s interior novel into a sweeping epic that speaks to the 21st-century soul.

Their labors are abetted by a dream cast headed by Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, who perfectly inhabit their roles as a mixed-class couple whose love is doomed by a child’s lie and World War II.

In the book, abstract considerations play out slowly, and narrative voices change imperceptibly. Movies are by nature more literal, and often need to move quickly to hold our attention. The pace of Wright’s filmmaking can be brisk. (He’s the English director whose debut feature was the 2005 version of "Pride and Prejudice," with Knightley as Lizzie Bennet.) But Wright is also good at conveying leisure -- even the torpor of a hot summer between the wars -- with telling details: the slow click of Briony’s typewriter, a bee buzzing at a windowpane, the premonitory silhouette of a bomber seen through a skylight.