Drama. Starring Kerry Fox, Anamaria Marinca and Stephen Dillane. Directed by Hans-Christian Schmid. In English and in German, Bosnian and Serbian with English subtitles. (Not rated. 105 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)"Storm" takes viewers into a milieu that most of us know nothing about, the World Court in The Hague, where legal considerations find themselves in a constant tug-of-war with political realities. The movie, which tells a fictional but hardly far-fetched story about the efforts to prosecute a Serbian war criminal, serves as a primer for what it's like to be a dedicated lawyer in a complicated, ever-shifting environment.
Along the way, it presents a satisfying character study of a certain kind of mid-career professional woman, who is long past sentiment, long past naivete, totally at home with power - and yet still idealistic and capable of being disillusioned. Kerry Fox plays the prosecutor with a toughness that calls to mind Barbara Stanwyck - or Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has the determined, merciless gaze of someone you would not want to be caught lying to.
The movie gives Fox a chance to show multiple sides of this woman, as a lawyer, advocate, friend and girlfriend. Fox gives us all these dimensions, not as separate modes, but as part of a complete person, so there's lots of overlap. Fox understands the character's strengths, but more important, understands her driving passion - justice. And so she looks at everyone with complete awareness of how each might advance her ultimate goal.
Fox gets strong support from her two co-stars, Stephen Dillane as her boss and Anamaria Marinca as the Bosnian woman whose testimony will be necessary for conviction.
At the start of the film, Hannah (Fox) has been passed over for promotion, in favor of Keith (Dillane). She's the better lawyer, but he's safer and less likely to rock the international boat.
Marinca, who played a woman under lots of stress in "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," trying to get an illegal abortion for her friend in communist Romania, finds herself under the gun again, faced with two unattractive alternatives: Either she keeps quiet and lets murderers and rapists escape justice, or she risks herself and her family for a World Court that might not be all that interested in justice after all.
In addition to its other virtues, "Storm" is a tense legal thriller, and it provides audiences with the sense of being on the inside of things, watching the legal sausage being made. It's not always appetizing.
As befitting a movie about the World Court, the film is truly international in feeling. Because Fox, Dillane and Marinca play English-speaking characters, most of the film is in English, but there are touches of Serbian, Bosnian and German, and the movie plays out in a number of countries, though mainly in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
If the movie has one flaw, it's an unusual one: It should be longer. "Storm" takes on a big subject, and something about the finish feels abrupt and truncated. "Storm" could use another 15 minutes.