It fails as a pastiche; black and white and period lighting equipment does not a forties noir movie make. The editing is too frantic. The story has really nothing sincere to offer, and George Clooney gets beaten up from sniffing around too much multiple times like clockwork.

When your movie's poster alludes to Casablanca, you better be able to live up to that.

I hate to do it, but steven sometimes you just make bad movies. This movie was boring and trite and could have possibly stamped out any hope of soderbergh being a great filmmaker. Sure he has other movies to fall back on but you want so much more in this one, and it never puts out. It is lazy, and sad trying to hard to be a film noir without any reason for it to be indicated as such. Waste your time on something else. Watch this when there is truly nothing else.

This was a movie that had a ton of potential. You have a great cast, a pretty good director and a great idea, especially filming a film noir movie in black and white. But the story was really weak and very uninteresting. The acting was alright, but for the cast that was involved, this should have been better. The only one who stood out was Tobey Maguire. He was excellent and when you see what happens top him, the movie just falls from there. This was a major disappointment.

I kept thinking of Casablanca when I saw this film. In addition, I was reminded of Star Wars III because of the scene transitions. It's like a third grader was using Imovie...I hate those sliding transitions!!!

Looks really neat, but sucks pretty bad. Hilarious to see Clooney go like 0 and 12 in all the fights he has in it, though.

An interesting and exciting filmmaking experiment, Soderbergh nails the feel and visuals of the Golden Age wartime romance, particularly in the way the lighting bleeds across the landscape; it's also not a bad deconstruction of their often tame presentations of violence, throwing brutality in with the nostalgia. However, the three leads - one faithful homage (Clooney), one knowing deconstruction (Blanchett) and one modern thriller (Maguire) - are endemic of the film's basic crisis of identity.

"It's a political tale with no significant contemporary reverberations, a turgid espionage-tinged romance with no soul, and a play-it-again aesthetic showpiece without a point." - Nick Schager

39.500

True film noir. George Clooney is from a different time, and he proves it here. As a genre piece it's great, but the way post-war Germany is visualised, is a bit distracting. The voice-over change worked out fine( much to my surprise), and yes, it's fairly entertaining too.

I really liked it. Really good cast, and on top of that I really liked the story line. Makes me want to look into post-war Berlin and the Nurmenburg Trials. Cate Blanchett is gorgeous and a terrific actress. I'd actually say her hotness is underrated.

Soderbergh's tribute to noir. He does wonders with the photographic style, the film looks absolutely beautiful. But it's all too self-conscious and gimmicky, and even on paper sounds like a bad idea. Peppering the film with nudity and the f-bomb is pretty much a no-win situation. Doing it in a movie SET in the 40's is one thing, but when you're trying to emulate a movie FROM the 40's, it shatters the illusion. Not really worth watching, but the cinematography is very nice.

As an experiment in "Can we make a new movie that looks very old," it is excellently done. However, it mostly just made me want to go watch "The Third Man" again.