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Michael Clayton
EMAILPRINTWarner Bros. Pictures

Universal acclaim
Based on 36 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 186 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Tony Gilroy
Directed by: Tony Gilroy
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 5, 2007
DVD: February 19, 2008
Running Time: 119 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for language including some sexual dialogue
Starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sean Cullen, Michael O'Keefe, and Sydney Pollack
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is an in-house "fixer" at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. At the behest of the firm’s co-founder Marty Bach, Clayton, a former prosecutor from a family of cops, takes care of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen’s dirtiest work. Clayton cleans up clients’ messes, handling anything from hit-and-runs and damaging stories in the press to shoplifting wives and crooked politicians. Burned out and discontented in his job, Clayton is inextricably tied to the firm. At the agrochemical company U/North, the career of in-house chief counsel Karen Crowder rests on the settlement of the suit that Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. When the firms top litigator, the brilliant Arthur Edens, has an apparent breakdown and tries to sabotage the entire case, Marty Back sends Michael Clayton to tackle this unprecedented disaster and in doing so, Clayton comes face to face with the reality of what he has become. (Warner Bros.)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Duplicity
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
This loving throwback to the paranoid thrillers of the ’70s is a beauty.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
An excellent legal thriller elevated to superb drama by the actor's (Clooney) central performance.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Michael Clayton is a here’s-how-it-happened drama, cleverly but not over-elaborately structured.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
A spellbinding action-drama, skillfully built upon a scary corporate conspiracy, chock-full of enjoyable downbeat performances.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
A smart and suspenseful legal thriller that comes completely alive on-screen.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Has a slow build and a strong payoff, but George Clooney is the element that holds it together.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
There is an audience out there for slower, more intellectual thrillers. This is a motion picture for them to discover.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
George Clooney's film noir sensibility in the title role feels authentic, and admirably solid.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Without the steadfast intelligence of Clooney's performance, Michael Clayton wouldn't work half as well as it does.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 186 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Nick G gave it a1:
I've had to force myself to watch this film on more than on occasion and I have to say that I still haven't quite caught on to the unnecessarily complicated plot.The performance of the actors, I have to say was quite convincing...But it still was enough for me to enjoy the film.It is baffling to see the acclaim this movie got-I doubt most of the reviewers understood this movie 100%.
Bob N gave it a10:
What matters to me in a film is the atmosphere, the tone, and how the characters and plot heighten or develop that tone. This film is simple. It is simply good. I love the tone of this film, the corporation lurking always in the background and the sense of dread. Simply put, one of the best films of the past 5 years.
Kevin C. gave it a0:
Horrible. Watched it with 5 intelligent, educated professionals, and 1 hour in to it, when it was obvious everyone wanted to quit watching it we still couldn't tell you what the movie was about. Possibly the most boring film I've ever tried to endure. I truly can't believe the acclaim this steaming pile of boredom received...it completely baffles me. God, it was so bad.
Nathn gave it an8:
I wouldnt call it an incredible, amazing, perfect movie, but i found it very interesting. took a while for the whole plot to start to come together, although that might also be because all my friends were talking the whole time. Its a very intelligent movie, and if you want a mindless movie to sit through, do not watch Clayton. you will be disappointed. however, if you like intelligent movies that make you think, Clayton is a winner. a slightly slow movie, but well worth it.
Brandon S. gave it a9:
Starts slow, but by the end is really captivating. Very suspenseful in the best possible way. Each half-hour of this 2-hour movie improves over the one that came before. I highly recommend this to fans of subtle characterizations, great acting, and intelligent writing and directing.
Cat S. gave it a10:
Really fantastic. Suspenseful, and phenomenally acted. If you want a smart thriller that respects its audience, this is the one.
MiKE gave it a0:
Well acted. but who cares? This movie was a bore! I made myself watch the whole movie, waiting for clever twist. But it never came.
