Writer-director Kari Skogland's sharp-edged, doc-style drama Fifty Dead Men Walking is loosely based on the true story of Martin McGartland, who lived life on a tightrope in the late 1980s during the Troubles in Northern Ireland: McGartland served as a loyal IRA member—and passed intelligence on to the Brits. (A Dead Man is what the IRA called an informer, and for good reason.) Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) makes a believable cocky lad who signs on for the con; an oddly bewigged Ben Kingsley is fussier and too actorly as his handler.
