Michael Clayton.

"Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton feels so fresh, so smart, so different from the standard-issue legal thriller that it isn't until nearly an hour in that you notice how conventional a movie it actually is," writes Slate's Dana Stevens.

"It's a story about ethics and their absence, a slow-to-boil requiem for American decency in which George Clooney, the ultimate in luxury brands and playboy of the Western world, raises the sword in the name of truth and justice and good," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Well, someone's got to do it.... We need George Clooney, just as we needed Warren Beatty - seducer of heavy hearts and troubled minds, the beautiful bearer of our very bad tidings."

Updated through 10/6.

Here's the angle Mark Asch takes in the L Magazine: "Michael Clayton is the urban, white-collar brother to Shooter's awakened Red-Stater Bob Lee Swagger, swapping scruffy, flannel-wrapped roughneck Mark Wahlberg for gray-templed, sharp-suited palm-greaser George Clooney; government black ops for private-sector malfeasance; and action film pyromania for the fast-n-low boardroom-speak of the paranoia thriller."

"I don't know what vast significance Michael Clayton has (it involves deadly pollution but isn't a message movie)," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "But I know it is just about perfect as an exercise in the genre. I've seen it twice, and the second time, knowing everything that would happen, I found it just as fascinating because of how well it was all shown happening."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek on Clooney: "This is one of the great performances of the year, an unflashy turn that comes to mean even more after the movie is over, a performance that makes you think about what you've just seen rather than instantly banish it. In a movie climate where big-studio releases churn ever more quickly through the theaters, the vitality of certain performers, like Clooney, becomes more important than ever. He may be the star of Michael Clayton, but his performance is all about undercurrents. Instead of taking control of the movie in any overt way, he commands our attention by swimming just beneath its surface. He's a disappearing act with staying power."

"Watching this film makes you feel that Gilroy, best known for writing credits on all three Bourne films, has poured the energy pent up during a decade and a half in Hollywood into this strong and confident directorial debut about desperate men searching for redemption in a cold and ruthless world," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"This is as languid as the Bourne movies are feverish, as nuanced and intricate as those films are full-steam-ahead," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice.

"[W]hat fascinates most is Gilroy and company's seemingly whole-hearted belief in the bill of goods they're selling: a dull, anti-capitalist screed made by fervent capitalists," writes Keith Uhlich, breaking ranks at the Reeler. "It's also a solemn gob of New Age hooey, as those hilltop steeds and Realm and Conquest (the in-film fantasy novel read by Clayton's son and passed around between characters like divinely begotten writ) all-too-conspicuously show."

"In a heartbreaking, scene-stealing performance, [Tom] 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," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Tilda Swinton lends a disarming vulnerability to the film's unusually complex villain, a woman who learns the hard way that trying to make it in a man's world can be murder."

"Hipster filmmakers keep looking backwards to the 1970s, hoping to disguise how ill-equipped they are to deal with contemporary social issues," writes, yes, Armond White in the New York Press. "Zodiac, David Fincher's latest meditation on violence, Jesse James/Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik's meditation on history, and now Michael Claytons meditation on paranoia all share a shameless imitation of 1970s filmmaking styles. In fact, they imitate the dullest: Alan J Pakula's All the President's Men."

"[D]amn if Clooney doesn't sell it with gusto, exuding poignant confliction over choices which can never fully be atoned for even during the prolonged closing close-up that reveals the film's guiding impetus as an Oscar-baiting vehicle for its leading man," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"The film is more patient than thrilling in developing its multi-layered plot, and, frankly, there are elements in it... that seemed to me rather murky," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "But there's still something deeply absorbing about Michael Clayton, which stems largely from the way it allows its characters their quirks."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Gilroy "about working as a writer for hire, the unexpected success of the Bourne movies, and the night he spent choosing machine guns with Russell Crowe."

For the LAT, Susan King talks Wilkinson - and with Gilroy about Wilkinson.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice, Toronto and the UK run.

Updates, 10/6: "It's a character study in the tradition of, say, Harry and Tonto or A Woman Under the Influence, but it also wants to be a paranoid thriller along the lines of The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "And while Michael Clayton may not always succeed in serving these two ambitions, it's top-notch acting by a very talented cast... that makes the whole enterprise work."

Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with Gilroy.

Posted by dwhudson at October 5, 2007 2:31 AM