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91Very much a '70s-style paranoid thriller, with a mood, tone and cascade of plot twists that are highly reminiscent of his 1975 classic, "Three Days of the Condor."
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90Thrillers don't get much smarter than The Interpreter.
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88As beautifully designed, swift and sleek as a classic sports car, throbbing with emotion and intelligence, it's a neat suspense film that's also dramatically and sociologically potent, with two supremely talented stars, Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, delivering beyond the emotional call of duty.
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83An elegant adventure of a different kind.
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80Coolly absorbing without being pulse-quickening.
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75The Interpreter bristles with the smart, steadily engrossing tension that marked such 1970s goodies as "All the President's Men," "The Parallax View" and Pollack's own "Three Days of the Condor."
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75What I admire most about the film is the way it enters the terms of this world -- of international politics, security procedures, shifting motives -- and observes the details of all-night stakeouts, shop talk, and interlocking motives and strategies.
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75A swiftly told, smartly acted yarn, and it even has an idea or two on its mind.
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75Watching these coolly precise, methodical actors spar with each other at the top of their game is half the show.
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75An intelligent, old-fashioned nail-biter.
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75A suspense thriller of rare intelligence.
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75A cut above the average politically-based thriller.
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75Slick, well-acted, and smarter than it has to be.
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75The movie's main strengths are its use of the real United Nations as its prime location and Pollack's ability to stud this movie (as he also did "The Firm") with players who do supporting-character equivalents of star turns.
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70Penn is terrific in his low-key doggedness.
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70Made with an intelligence and craft that's increasingly rare in Hollywood thrillers.
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70The Kidman character is an exotic--and even unlikely--creature, usefully fueling Penn's annoyed but fascinated incredulity.
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70Yes, this could be a better film, but the good qualities it does have are rare enough to hold our interest on screen and off.
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70In the absence of internal logic, external style and emotional intelligence carry the day.
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70As a straight-ahead thriller, the movie is enjoyable and stirring much of the time.
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67The Interpreter is ultimately fluent in many things, but an out-and-out thriller it is not.
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67It's a thriller, and a large one, and it's got a couple of terrific performers in the center.
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63But at the risk of sounding ungrateful, Sydney Pollack's latest film should have been a lot better.
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63With major stars, a name director and grown-up subject matter, this middling drama is less a movie to recommend with vigor than to covet on general principles.
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63An old-fashioned suspense drama with an old-fashioned belief at its core: Justice can be done in the world, and the United Nations is the global organization to do it.
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60In the end, nothing about The Interpreter strikes us as very original.
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60Solid, mature and finely acted, but intermittently daft.
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60There's enough narrative for three fine films. But not enough for The Interpreter. The thriller pieces feel assembled rather than organic.
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60The Interpreter is long and tangled, the score is yet another drownout from the thundering James Newton Howard, and the avowed thoughtfulness--about sub-Saharan politics, about the clashing commitments to peace and justice, about the kinship of damaged souls--is at once laudable and vaporous.
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50The film feels long, the editing is choppy, and the plot strands are at once convoluted and cliched.
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50A righteous but wrongheaded thriller, chokes on its well-meant outrage and leaves a moth-eaten plot and handful of nonsense characters on its way to a dopey finish.
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50The ideal: It hopes to be a suspenseful political yarn carrying a lofty message of peace and understanding. The reality: It's just a flabby thriller that gets completely lost in translation.
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50Its talky, sluggish script is so bereft of thrills -- intellectual or otherwise -- that even the film's one masterfully staged sequence... falls flat.
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50The Interpreter is so intent on reminding us that it's a QUALITY piece of work that it forgets to give us the very thing we thought we came in for: a story.
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50When it comes to the United Nations, though, the movie turns to Jell-O. Whether Pollack was softened up by his meetings with U.N. brass (all the way up to Kofi Annan), or by his own gentlemanly Midwestern liberalism, he is alarmingly circumspect about that august body.
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50The Interpreter dashes the suspense by talking the audience to death.
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50Conventionally described as a political thriller, but The Interpreter is as apolitical as it is unthrilling.
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50Gets more and more complex until it's almost laughable; it has too many beats, too many reverses, and in the end seems unbelievable.
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Five people worked on the script; if there was ever any inspiration behind it, there isn't now.
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40Too bloated with its own significance to deliver the requisite thrills.
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40The director, Sydney Pollack, who appears briefly in the film, has done his experienced best with this Scotch-taped script. But his two stars are insuperable handicaps.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 49 out of 77
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Mixed: 13 out of 77
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Negative: 15 out of 77
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PhilK.5
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abird6Definetly watchable. Characters a bit too underplayed.
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SteveP2