6 Days

"NZ playwright turned movie director Toa Fraser keeps things tight, ratcheting up the tension gradually in this tense drama, closely based on the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege in London. There’s a solid cast all playing real people - Jamie Bell as SAS officer Rusty Firmin, Mark Strong as hostage negotiator Max Vernon, the late Tim Pigott-Smith as politician William Whitelaw, Martin Shaw as Police commander John Dellow, and Abbie Cornish as young BBC correspondant Kate Adie, reporting on her first big story."

"Shot and styled in contemporary, ticking-clock action fashion, it compresses the complex Thatcher-era politics of its fractious standoff into a simplified West-versus-Middle-East conflict that registers as broadly topical."

"With a barrage of title-card identifications, "6 Days" can feel closer to a re-enactment than a thriller. To the extent that the movie has a political angle, it's perhaps gratuitously jingoistic."

"Jamie Bell might get all the action scenes and top billing, but the true star of Kiwi director Toa Fraser's based-on-fact drama is Mark Strong."

"Informative and well-executed, but lacking the requisite exhilaration that such life-and-death situations usually deliver."

"Based on – and honouring – first-person testimonies of those present, 6 Days delivers viewers the passion and adrenaline of a mission: impossible."

"It may lack some of the edges of the usual of its fare, but that's a good thing here..."

"A stiffly executed re-creation of the events surrounding the 1980 hostage-taking attack on London's Iranian Embassy that packs all the high-stakes intrigue of a filed police report."