Critic Reviews

Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in "Le Samourai," by Jean-Pierre Melville.

Anton Corbijn's The American looks and feels like a movie made by a filmmaker who hasn't been to the movies since the '70s - and I mean that as the highest compliment.

The American, a movie as coiled as a snake and as still as a sleepy villa, is the rare grownup thriller that knows the link between peace and danger and the tension that comes from both.

Despite its director's disinterest in letting people in, there is nevertheless something exciting about a movie this uncompromised, in which the big change from the book to the screen actually toughens up the story instead of watering it down.

If you're willing to let go of your Hollywood-bred expectations for a movie of this type-spectacular action set pieces, constant pulse-pounding music, a killing every 15 minutes-The American is a great pleasure to watch, an astringent antidote to the loud, frantic action movies that have been clogging our veins all summer.

Crisp, compact and cryptic, The American is a standard-issue hit-man thriller tailor made for George Clooney.

Corbijn makes the familiar strange, focusing on details other filmmakers would gloss over.

Heavyhearted without being heavy-handed, Corbijn's lyrical movie is about a man who has built his own cell and become his own jailer.

It does for hit men what "Up in the Air" did for frequent-flying corporate terminators, minus the comic tang.

Best appreciated as an exercise in style. Based on Martin Booth's novel "A Very Private Gentleman," the film establishes and sustains a mood of suspense, but Corbijn seems only minimally interested in conventional thrills.