Last Night (2010)

Massy Tadjedin's Last Night is a 2010 romantic drama about a married couple spending one night apart, each circling the possibility of infidelity. Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington play Joanna and Michael, and the film treats their marriage as a quiet, credible thing. The cultural temperature here is low. The cast has international texture and Eva Mendes gives Laura a warmth that resists the usual homewrecker template. That is representation by presence, not by proclamation. The film never turns her into a lesson.

Tadjedin directs with a woman's eye on both the wife and the other woman, and the result is a mild feminist perspective: neither Joanna nor Laura is reduced to a symbol, and the camera does not devour them. The film also has no interest in race as a thesis, no LGBTQ story, no climate anxiety, no critique of capital, no body positivity arc, no neurodivergence subplot, and no revisionist history. It is a contemporary moral drama with a narrow aperture. The characters are prosperous professionals in New York, and their problems are intimate, not systemic.

The film's urge to lecture is faint. It poses infidelity as an open question and lets the audience sit with the ambiguity. There is no sermon, no final speech, no righteous finger wag. The remainder is a small, well-acted chamber piece that understands temptation as a matter of timing and trust. It is not trying to save the world. It is trying to show two people failing to tell each other the truth for one night. That modesty is its virtue and its limit.