Paul Giamatti headlines writer/director Tom McCarthy’s comedy drama centering on a beleaguered attorney and part-time wrestling coach who schemes to keep his practice from going under by acting as the legal caretaker of an elderly client. Mike Flaherty (Giamatti) thinks he has discovered the perfect loophole to keep his practice in business. But his brilliant plan hits an unexpected hitch when his client’s troubled grandson shows up looking for a place to stay. With his home life in turmoil and both of his careers in jeopardy, Mike quickly realizes that he’ll have to get creative in order to find a way out of his current predicament.
The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman teams with screenwriters Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth to streamline Joseph Wilson’s and Valerie Plame’s books detailing the explosive outing of undercover CIA agent Plame into a tense docudrama thriller starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. At the time her cover was blown by the George W. Bush administration, Plame (Watts) was combing Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction as part of the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division. Her husband, American diplomat Joe Wilson was attempting to verify a claim that the Iraqis had recently purchased enriched uranium from Niger when the White House began beating the war drums before any solid evidence had been gathered. When Joe penned an editorial in The New York Times decrying the hasty call to war, a prolific Washington, D.C. journalist took the opportunity to reveal Plame’s identity as a CIA operative, an act that not only put her career in jeopardy, but also left her various contacts overseas in a precarious position. Years later, a jobless and publicly disgraced Plame wages a vicious fight to clear her name, set the record straight, and keep her family from falling apart.