In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: In the craptacular month of February, when Hollywood typically drowns us in all-star drool like Valentine’s Day, it’s indecent luck having two films in play directed by indisputable masters. First Scorsese’s Shutter Island, and now Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. The Polish director, currently under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. for having unlawful sex with a minor in 1977, is in deep doo-doo. But not, in this critic’s view, as a filmmaker. The Ghost Writer, based on the Robert Harris bestseller, shows Polanski in brilliant command of a political thriller that ties you up in knots of tension while zinging politics and showbiz like two sides of the same toxic coin. 
  
 Polanski, who won a 2002 Oscar for the Holocaust-themed The Pianist, is in a playful, prickly mood here that recalls his early work on Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. Ewan McGregor grabs and runs with his juiciest role in years as the Ghost, a writer hired to pen the memoirs of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), the unseated British prime minister now taking refuge in America after being accused of war crimes back home. Any resemblance between Lang and Tony Blair seems purely intentional, since Harris, who wrote the script with Polanski, is on the record as becoming disillusioned with Blair after the PM allegedly teamed up with President Bush to hand over suspected terrorists for torture by the CIA. One reviewer of Harris’ book cheekily labeled it The Blair Snitch Project. 
  
 Peter Travers reviews The Ghost Writer in his weekly video podcast, "At the Movies With Peter Travers." 
  
 Like Polanski, Lang is in exile. The former PM is holed up in a Cape Cod beach house with his manipulative wife (Olivia Williams) and an executive assistant (Kim Cattrall) who doubles as his mistress. Don’t be thrown by the Sex and the City star’s Brit accent — she was born in Liverpool. And it’s fun to see Cattrall play covert sexuality for a change of Samantha pace. 
  
 Get more news, reviews and interviews from Peter Travers on The Travers Take. 
  
 The Ghost knows he’s in over his head. His specialty is ghosting for rock stars and other celebs du trash. There’s another chilling detail: The writer who started the book with Lang has been found dead under mysterious circumstances. 
  
 Since Polanski couldn’t travel outside certain legal jurisdictions, he used Berlin for London and the island of Sylt in the North Sea to fill in for Martha’s Vineyard. But the kick in this sexy, addictive thriller comes in the telling. As the media swarm outside Lang’s beach house, everyone inside feels a trap closing in. No one but Polanski could find the adrenaline rush in such maddening claustrophobia. There are moments when you damn near jump out of your seat as the Ghost snoops around looking for incriminating truth and a chance to have it off with the wife of his subject. 
  
 All credit to a finely tuned Brosnan for packing so much intensity and wayward wit into his scenes with McGregor. Their verbal duels make for a dazzling game of cat-and-mouse. 
  
 Polanski’s skill with actors hasn’t waned. Even the smallest roles are expertly played. Timothy Hutton scores as Lang’s American lawyer, and Jim Belushi nails the role of the Ghost’s scandal-hungry publisher. Best of all is Tom Wilkinson as Paul Emmet, a Harvard law professor whom the Ghost believes holds the key to Lang’s links with the CIA. After an action-packed pursuit of the Ghost on a ferry, the movie ends on a note of shocking challenge. You can feel Polanski’s excitement to be working on a film that echoes 1970s classics such as Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View. Whatever happens to Polanski in real life, his reel life is in excellent shape. The Ghost Writer is one of his diabolical best. ||||| Ghost Writer, The THRILLER: France/Germany/United Kingdom, 2010 U.S. Release Date: 2010-02-19 Running Length: 2:10 MPAA Classification: PG-13 (Profanity, Sexual Content, Violence) Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Cast: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Timothy Hutton, Tom Wilkinson, Eli Wallach, James Belushi, Robert Pugh Director: Roman Polanski Screenplay: Robert Harris, Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Robert Harris Cinematography: Pawel Edelman Music: Alexandre Desplat U.S. Distributor: Summit Entertainment Subtitles: none 
  
 The Ghost Writer is a reminder that, regardless of his real-life problems, Roman Polanski can still craft compelling thrillers. This isn't Chinatown, but it doesn't need to be. Based on the novel The Ghost by Robert Harris, it's a fictional tale unambiguously designed to validate various conspiracy theories that have been in existence since the war in Iraq began. The film is effectively paced and does not suffer from the awkward compression problems that sometimes accompany the stripping down of complex novels into two hour motion pictures. There are times when the movie relies upon hard-to-swallow coincidences to propel the narrative forward (the oh-so-convenient appearance of Eli Wallach being one example) but, on the whole, The Ghost Writer holds together. This is especially remarkable when one considers that a significant portion of the post-production was done by Polanski while under arrest. 
  
 The film opens with an unoccupied car left abandoned on a ferry while a body washes up on a nearby beach near the Massachusetts retreat of ex-British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). It turns out that the dead man was the ghost writer of Lang's autobiography and a replacement has to be found quickly in order to ensure the publication date doesn't slip. The job goes to the movie's unnamed protagonist (Ewan McGregor), who finds himself thrust into the midst of a maelstrom of personal and political crises. Lang is about to be charged by the World Court for crimes against humanity, his former close political ally Richard Rycart (Robert Pugh) has turned against him, and his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), has lost patience over his brazen affair with his assistant, Amelia (Kim Cattrall). As the Ghost Writer begins to dig, he uncovers information that puts his life in danger. 
  
 Lang represents a Prime Minister in the Tony Blair mold and the story postulates how Blair might have come to support George W. Bush's war in Iraq. There's a Haliburton-inspired company and various unsavory characters skulking in the background. The Ghost Writer neither claims to be representing the truth nor to be based on actual events, but it's obvious where its roots are buried. Nonetheless, some of the best thrillers have developed from fictionalized accounts of historical events. Polanski also pokes fun at his own situation. After Lang has been accused of crimes against humanity, he realizes he must remain in the United States since it's one of the few countries that does not recognize the jurisdiction of the court. As long as he's in America, he can be a free man; if he returns to the U.K., he will be arrested upon arrival. The irony of incorporating this story element must have been too delicious for Polanksi to bypass. (Whether it's in good taste is another matter altogether.) 
  
 The action/thriller aspects are handled expertly. The chase sequences are involving. There's never a sense that the protagonist is invulnerable - he's far from a superhero. The film keeps us guessing for a while and, even once we think we have figured out what's going on, the possibility exists that we're misreading something. There are two twists in the final act that, although not changing the essential backbone of the story, divorce The Ghost Writer from some of the most common conventions of this sort of thriller. 
  
 Ewan McGregor plays (or underplays) the sort of low-key role he has become comfortable with in his post-Star Wars career - a slightly wimpy guy who gets sucked into something because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Often after thinking it's the right place and the right time.) Pierce Brosnan has the requisite good looks and charm to allow us to believe he was once a Prime Minister; I didn't think of 007 once during the course of the movie, which shows that Brosnan has moved on in ways his predecessors were unable to do. (Connery, despite shedding the role in the early '70s, found that it dogged him to the day of his retirement.) Olivia Williams is a little scary as the cold, calculating silent power behind her husband. Only Kim Cattrall strikes a wrong note. The superficiality of her performance is out-of-step with the importance of the role. A lot of familiar faces show up in small roles: Jim Belushi, Timothy Hutton, Eli Wallach, and - most memorably - Tom Wilkinson. 
  
 A word must be said about the look of the film. Most of it transpires in New England and, unless Polanski found a way to sneak into the United States without anyone knowing, he found a note-perfect stand-in. Maybe denizens of the real Cape Cod will recognize the differences, but I was fooled. The same holds true with scenes set in London - another location where, if I am not mistaken, Polanski needed to avoid (at least at the time). Whatever chicanery he employed to clone Massachusetts and London, it was expertly done. 
  
 As with most political thrillers, The Ghost Writer emphasizes plot development and atmosphere over action. It's an "adult" thriller as opposed to one designed for viewers suffering from ADD. The running time, which clocks in at a shade over two hours, seems a little on the long side. Overall, however, it's a successful endeavor from a filmmaker whose future behind-the-camera enterprises are in doubt. 
  
 Discuss this topic in the ReelViews Forums. |||||
A: 
Roman Polanski’s new movie, an atmospheric political thriller, is a winner, critics agree—assuming you can forget the off-screen drama surrounding the director. Here’s what they’re saying: It’s “a dark pearl of a movie…made by a filmmaker suddenly returned to the height of his power,” writes Ken Turan of the LA Times. Polanski works his trademark themes into an “impeccable adult entertainment” not unlike Chinatown or Rosemary’s Baby. “Polanski’s skill with actors hasn’t waned,” marvels Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. “Ewan McGregor grabs and runs with his juiciest role in years,” and “even the smallest roles are expertly played.” “The Ghost Writer is a reminder that, regardless of his real-life problems, Roman Polanski can still craft compelling thrillers,” writes James Berardinelli of ReelViews. It’s especially impressive given that Polanski couldn’t shoot in the US, and finished the film under house arrest. But Kyle Smith of the New York Post couldn’t get over it. For god’s sake, he says, the movie’s all about the systematic disrespect of women and its villain is a guy hiding from extradition—making Polanski “the mayor of Chutzpahtown.”