There's a certain distance with which you view the characters, the involvement is not such that they stay with you after the film.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 24, 2019

| Original Score: B- | Feb 18, 2012

It's Soderbergh's commitment and creativity that lift The Good German above many of its peers, no matter the era.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2007

Why emphasise flaws in a film of such overall ambition and expertise?

| Mar 8, 2007

This should have been Soderbergh gold. Instead it is mostly unengaging and dull, proof positive that they don't make them like they used to.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 7, 2007

A film that feels more like a cinematographer's showreel than an involving drama: flashy, but heartless.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 6, 2007

| Original Score: 2/6 | Feb 3, 2007

There's a line between homage and mimicry, and Soderbergh has crossed it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 19, 2007

We get no heroes, not even flawed ones. Clooney, our marquee man, chases through numbing plot contortions only because of his lust for Lena. By the time The Good German ended, I had barely a clue if the good ones had lived or died.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 19, 2007

The Good German is a movie wonk's triumph and no one else's. Soderbergh gets the visuals right but not the clean storytelling line of classic cinema, nor the iconic characters or moral certainty of the oldies.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 22, 2006

I have to admire an ostensibly nostalgic entertainment that so concertedly undermines the romanticism of wartime Hollywood.

| Dec 22, 2006

The photography is so beautiful, and the actors make brave choices, and Soderbergh's homage to the films he so obviously loves is done with such grace and passion -- so there's just enough that works to outweigh the major plot concerns.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 22, 2006

It works, as homage to a particular time and place in film history, and as a knowing revision that brings Hollywood's subtext of '40s postwar corruption to the surface. The Good German isn't so much an imitation as a crafty modernization.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 22, 2006

The Good German doesn't look like a period movie, and it doesn't feel like one. The black-and-white images are thin and garish, with blinding whites that destroy whatever Soderbergh is trying to do with shadow and contrast.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Dec 22, 2006

The crucial key elements that every vintage Warners film had as a matter of course are lacking here. The story isn't gripping or even coherent. There is no real romance. There's mystery, but only in a plot sense -- i.e., what's going on?

| Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 22, 2006

The trouble is the movie never really seems to go anywhere. Too many scenes have a feeling of irresolution; they just sort of go on for a while, then disappear.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 22, 2006

Interesting to watch, up to a point. The Good German gets lost amidst its references; it doesn't stand by itself but is held up by the films that inspired it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 22, 2006

A history-based, murder-mystery war-yarn that goes round and round in circles.

| Original Score: C | Dec 22, 2006

Everything about The Good German seems a few degrees off, as if the new map of Europe has somehow altered the latitudes along with attitudes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 22, 2006

I just wish I would have cared about the people walking around in this world as much as I marveled at the spectacle assembled to put them there.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 22, 2006