Michael Clayton

The excellent opening with Tom Wilkinson’s alarming monologue and shots of cold glass offices creates an atmosphere that will engage you and won’t let you go until the final shot of Michael Clayton. The screenwriter of the Bourne trilogy, Tony Gilroy, produced a respectable directorial debut and, thanks to its deeper message, puts his genre competitors Steven Zaillian (A Civil Action) and Sydney Pollack (The Firm) to shame. Tilda Swinton is great here, as are Wilkinson and Clooney. This drama is a proud representative of the “Hollywood Art” category. (01/21/2008)

A corporate apocalypse with a terrific script, direction, music, and performances. Characters abound and it's not hard to get tangled up in the convoluted story at times. But it's all the more satisfying when you get it back and everything starts to fall into place in you. Add to that the perfect scenes, led by the murder of Arthur Edensen, and the lack of audience pandering, and the rating is clear. And the ending... Anyone who doesn't like this, hop on back to Seagal ;) (09/13/2010)

In the face of Clooney's convincing warrior expression and Howard's emotional tones, I may feel guilty with my assessment, but any saving idea, warning finger, or suffocating statement drowns in the inarticulate and yet unnecessarily entangled boredom, which minute by minute increasingly flows towards an unsurprising conclusion. (08/21/2008)

Cold, distant, and unforgiving. Tony Gilroy is a very wise man who has managed to make his name a trademark, under which he is going to distribute goods of the best quality. You’ll be so chilled by Tom Wilkinson's opening monologue alone that you won't melt until the closing credits. This high-level legal game with lives on the line knocks you out with its formal austerity, which gives ample room for narrative peripeteia and theatrics in which the venerable academy has once again crowned the wrong person. Tilda Swinton spends the few minutes she gets looking like an uptight spinster, and immediately the golden statuettes come tumbling down. But otherwise, apart from the hasty introduction, I have no major complaints. 4 ½ (with the promise of a reunion coming soon). (03/29/2008)

Michael Clayton was a completely different movie than I originally expected. No lawsuits, no flashy crime story with a shocking final reveal, but a perfectly sober and precise drama with amazing performances. I'm not so much talking about George Clooney, who once again performs to his classically high standard and is more than convincing as a stubborn negotiator suspecting a great deception, but in particular about the deranged Tom Wilkinson and his tiresome monologues, and the lawyer Tilda Swinton, who perhaps still carries a piece of the evil queen from Narnia. And even though I was quite sceptical at first and the plot seemed far-fetched, the slowly unravelling story gradually drew me in and I really enjoyed the final part. Tony Gilroy has made a low-key but very subtle film that is one of the pillars of its genre... (08/29/2012)