Movie Guide

The Circle (2017) – in cinemas from Friday, May 19

The Circle is a gripping modern thriller starring Emma Watson ("Harry Potter"), Tom Hanks ("Sully") and John Boyega ("Star Wars: The Force Awakens").

Mae Holland (Emma Watson) is an ordinary and unaccomplished young woman with an ill father. Through an influential college friend, she seizes the opportunity of a lifetime when she gets a customer relations job at the world's most powerful technology and social media company The Circle. Mae quickly rises through company's ranks, and is selected for an assignment with the Circle's newest technology which she eagerly takes on. Encouraged by the company's founder Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), Mae soon finds herself in a perilous situation as she joins a groundbreaking experiment that pushes the boundaries of privacy, surveillance, ethics and personal freedom. Her participation in the experiment, and every decision she makes soon starts to affect the lives and determine the futures of her friends, family and that of humanity.

The film is an attention-getting, absorbing object lesson in neglecting critical thinking. How much information is too much? The Circle (an amalgam of Apple, Facebook, and the CIA) shows in a direct and melodramatic form that the saturation point is here. The film's provocative theme about full disclosure includes the implied dialectic between the common good and privacy. Knowing where criminals are, such as in our sex-offender laws, is good in the case of creeps, but scary when innocent citizens are the object.

More info on this movie can be found at www.imdb.com