Quietly Watching

  Yes, Stolen Girl is based on a true story, though you would never guess the real one from the trailer. The film hands Kate Beckinsale a gun, a stack of wigs, and a way into a CIA espionage web to pull her abducted daughter out of Beirut. The woman it is actually based on, Maureen Dabbagh, got her daughter back a very different way: a phone call at four in the morning, seventeen years after the girl was taken. That distance between the rescue movie and the real case is the most interesting thing about Stolen Girl, so it is worth walking through both. The Rescue Movie It Wants to Be On screen, Maureen is an ordinary American mother until her ex-husband spirits their young daughter, Amina, out of the country. She teams with Robeson, a mysterious ex-marine played by Scott Eastwood, who teaches her to shoot, to disguise herself, and to move through the underworld of international child recovery. The trail runs through Mexico, Albania, and Beirut, and it widens into a conspiracy with t...