The Kite Runner review

Based on Khaled Hosseini's best-selling book about his family's experience living in Afghanistan in the 1970s, Marc Forster's adaptation has attracted plenty of controversy. Reports that the film's distributors have had to evacuate the child actors from Afghanistan have been widely published. Indeed if the Taliban are still in control of parts of the country they are highly unlikely to welcome a film that depicts them as bearded oafs.

But this is not to say that Hosseini's source material is one-dimensional. Far from it in fact, as this is a sensitive and sentimental work that does a good job of shedding light on a situation that evolved into the world's number one political issue.

The film, and indeed the book, bears a strong resemblance to another of 2007's high profile releases, Atonement, as both deal with childhood - if not childish - acts which haunt the protagonists for the rest of their lives. Two young boys in Kabul form a strong friendship thanks to their mutual love of kite flying (an activity later banned by the mullahs), but when one betrays the other their lives are forever changed.

The production is at its strongest in its fascinating depiction of 70s Afghanistan which most audiences will be surprised to learn was an upbeat and modern country. People dressed smartly, drank, had record players and went to the cinema. The country's unfolding tragedy is well depicted, as the religious element takes a stranglehold before the Russian invasion started the slide into self-destruction.

Some audiences may find the sentimental aspects of the film jarring, and certainly the central character comes across as weak-willed if not downright unlikeable. But the depiction of the bigger picture is where The Kite Runner works best, and it provides plenty of food for thought about a desperate situation which seems increasingly to be falling off the front pages of the world's newspapers.

Paul Hurley