Michael Clayton

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.

USA Today Claudia Puig

It's a rare film that can challenge our minds and rattle our nerves so profoundly. This is unequivocally a thriller for adults. A deftly written, tautly suspenseful and intellectually demanding morality tale.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

I don't know what vast significance Michael Clayton has (it involves deadly pollution but isn't a message movie). But I know it is just about perfect as an exercise in the genre.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

At once spare and dense, chilly and thrilling, literate and visceral, it feeds in gray areas, teasing ambiguities and conundrums out of shadows and making strengths of inconclusiveness and uncertainty.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s ("All the President's Men," "Klute," "Three Days of the Condor") that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

This loving throwback to the paranoid thrillers of the ’70s is a beauty.

Austin Chronicle Steve Davis

Like Spencer Tracy, Gene Hackman, and others who have made acting on the big screen seem so easy while taking us on a journey that is far from simple, Clooney is the real thing.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Careful casting adds to verisimilitude. Nobody carries off a chilly authority figure like Tilda Swinton, who represents the chemical company; Pollack, who has more or less stopped directing, now embodies urbane amorality as an actor; Wilkinson, whose career has mostly been devoted to repressed or depressed characters, enjoys his turn as a bright-eyed fanatic.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Michael Clayton is about the gap between predatory professionalism and the sins of real life - about how those sins can corrode the hardest business suit of armor.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

An excellent legal thriller elevated to superb drama by the actor's (Clooney) central performance.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Tony Gilroy, co-author of the superb Jason Bourne film trilogy, makes a stunning directorial debut with Michael Clayton, an out-of-courtroom drama that helps solidify George Clooney's acting bona fides.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

There are more than ample rewards for discerning adults: Some of the best dialogue in a recent movie and a gallery of unforgettable performances.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Michael Clayton is a here’s-how-it-happened drama, cleverly but not over-elaborately structured.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Deliberate, demanding and character-driven, Michael Clayton flies in the face of what sells at the multiplex. I couldn't have liked it more.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

After Clooney, who gives a sterling performance as a tarnished figure, the standout performance belongs to Wilkinson, a geyser of manic eloquence. Also quite fine are Swinton and Sydney Pollack.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

In a heartbreaking, scene-stealing performance, Wilkinson plays his bipolar character's manic delirium as a heightened form of awareness, a life-affirming source of moral clarity in a cloudy and corrupt world.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

A spellbinding action-drama, skillfully built upon a scary corporate conspiracy, chock-full of enjoyable downbeat performances.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A smart and suspenseful legal thriller that comes completely alive on-screen.

Village Voice Robert Wilonsky

Gilroy's up to the challenge, as is his uniformly astounding cast--Clooney, especially, as the charmed and charming man stripped of his superpowers, but also Wilkinson and Swinton as the mirror images of each other.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

As with the Bourne films, Gilroy has a knack for creating strong characters and situations that resonate with tension. It may be formula, but the guy is a solid chemist as he crafts excellent set-ups and payoffs.

The New Yorker David Denby

It’s all fascinating. Gilroy is an entertainer.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Mr. Gilroy hasn’t reinvented the legal thriller here, but I doubt that was his intention; at its best and most ambitious, the film plays less like a variation on a Hollywood standard than a reappraisal. It’s a modest reappraisal, adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing; it entertains without shame.

Slate Dana Stevens

The great strength of Michael Clayton is that it's no "Erin Brockovich." Rather than a populist tale of class-action triumph, the movie is a grim vision of legal and ethical compromise at the top.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Instead of taking control of the movie in any overt way, Clooney commands our attention by swimming just beneath its surface. He's a disappearing act with staying power.

Time Richard Schickel

Michael Clayton is not an exercise in high-tension energy; you'll never confuse its eponymous protagonist with Jason Bourne. But it does have enough of a melodramatic pulse to keep you engaged in its story and, better than that, it is full of plausible characters who are capable of surprising -- and surpassing -- your expectations.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Quite possibly Clooney’s best effort to date.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Has a slow build and a strong payoff, but George Clooney is the element that holds it together.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Instead of the typical John Grisham-style connect-the-dots legal thriller, we get a film that's idiosyncratic, with a time-shifting structure, a surfeit of subplots and characters.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

While Gilroy deploys the occasional exploding car, the film's climax is all words -- angry, carefully sharpened words -- with the stopping power of large-caliber bullets.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

There is an audience out there for slower, more intellectual thrillers. This is a motion picture for them to discover.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Michal Clayton shares a number of affinities with Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's "Network." Wilkinson's got the so-mad-he's-sane Peter Finch position; while Swinton embodies a sexless, neurotic, overstressed variant of Faye Dunaway's character. Which leaves Clooney as the (considerably younger) William Holden of the piece. And, yes, he makes the most of it.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Clooney is as good as he has ever been.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

George Clooney's film noir sensibility in the title role feels authentic, and admirably solid.

Variety Brian Lowry

Features strong performances and a solid story, drawn from the familiar well of faceless corporations grinding ordinary people through their profit-making machinery. Yet Gilroy's fidelity to his script comes at the expense of the pacing.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Like "The Verdict," this is a big, crowd-pleasing Hollywood redemption drama in which the lonely hero not only thwarts the corporate villains in the end but silences them with a killer riposte.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Without the steadfast intelligence of Clooney's performance, Michael Clayton wouldn't work half as well as it does.