Only God knows everything. He works for Mossad.

Looking back over the films I've reviewed in this rapidly closing year (all 21 of them! That's like two a month. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?), I seriously wonder if any of them is as good as The Constant Gardener, which is uniformly excellent from beginning to end.

I can't really tell you much about the plot because the very first thing to happen in the film is an enormous spoiler that I really hope you haven't been told yet by some blabbermouth Guardian reviewer who doesn't know when to shut up. But that's okay, because I can rant about how much I liked other things.

For starters, it looks great. Not just the cinematography, but the locations are amazing. Kenya looks incredible, shot in a washed out, heavy grain. London, conversely, is shot in a dull, modern style, with heavily saturated blues and greys, and it looks beautiful. There's a scene where the walls of a conference room lift up and you realize you're looking out of the Tate down across the Thames- it was so wonderful it actually caught my breath. (aside: there's a lot of shaky-cam action, so it might pay to not sit directly in front of the screen, as I did)

The film itself is quite layered: For most of the time it is a high tension thriller, indeed many scenes have no overt threat in them, yet are filmed in such a way as to make them incredibly tense (which makes it all rather exhausting to watch). However as well as being a thriller it's also a touching, tragic love story, and also an important, informative political statement about the relationship between Africa and the West.

The acting is dynamite, a veritable who's who of British thesbs, with Ralph Fiennes standing out particularly as the title character.If anything, the movie is largely an homage to stereotypical British nebbishness, which is usually considered a source of mockery, but in this film reveals itself as a source of strength and resilience. There were at least three scenes where I was practically yelling: "Punch the bastard!" to the screen, yet he never does, which is perfectly in keeping with his character and goes to make him all the more memorable and worthy; as he makes his transition from a man who is completely in the dark about what is going on around him to someone who, as he says 'knows all of your secrets now'.

I could not recommend that you see this more strongly.