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Michael Clayton
Warner Bros. Pictures


7.0

based on 36 reviews
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based on 176 votes
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MPAA 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.)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Tony Gilroy
DIRECTED BY:	Tony Gilroy
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: February 19, 2008 Theatrical: October 5, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	119 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

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...

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 176 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Tony B. gave it a5:
Extremely well-acted but too slowly paced, it treads familiar ground; there is nothing new here. The three horses on the hill scene is pretentious and obvious, and the extended close-up of Clooney in the taxi at the end has "I'm the star" written all over it.

Josh D. gave it a4:
I really wanted to enjoy this movie but found it a little irritating... I know it is directed at a certain audience, and I also like to think I am in that audience but this movie just meandered along... George Clooney nearly looked like he didn't know what was going on as well !

Matt A. gave it a9:
Great movie with superb acting. George Clooney really surprised me, and i found his portrayal of michael clayton to be authentic and refreshing. Tom Wilkinson portrayed Arthur with complexity and depth, like a true mad genious. The film was never very suspensful, however, could be taken very seriously as a corporate thriller with interesting concepts and a thick plot. I highly recommend for those who love scandals, and who can easily comprehend these kinds of events.

D. Lebowski gave it a5:
Hopefully people call this intellectual only because they had plenty of time while the movie was droning on to think about more interesting topics or daydream. The choices the characters have to make are ridiculous and seem contrived to serve the weakly themed plot. Acting and direction were good, could have used an editing floor renovation.

Adrian G. gave it a9:
An intelligent, earthy, fiery and fluid drama - all the elements were there, all the cliches challenged, the world evoked believable, the characters intriguing, and beguiling. The three horses on the hill evoked a moral clarity beyond spoken words. Ultimately emotionally and intellectually satisfying, it cleverly questions how we can go on any other path than the truth. A wonderful companion to 'The Constant Garden'

Alec E. gave it a5:
the acting is good but its just clooney playing himself, youve seen it before. the story is good but its nothing you havent seen before in a thousand michael crichton stories. old hat.

James F. gave it a5:
Nothing special here. This story should have been a hour crime solving TV show. Overhyped, I was disappointed.

Michael Clayton Warner Bros. Pictures

Michael Clayton
Warner Bros. Pictures