The International: Critic Reviews

The star of the pic may well be NYC's Guggenheim Museum and Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, both of which figure in cool action chase sequences that pay handsome dividends.

The International, a sleek travelogue thriller, at least flirts with timeliness, winking at an angry and anxious public mood.

Clive Owen may have lost the chance of playing 007, but he can still carry off an action movie, and proves it in this smart and handsomely made corporate conspiracy thriller from German director Tom Tykwer and first-time screenwriter Eric Singer.

It's a well-made and handsome drama centering on a powerful and corrupt European bank with ties to arms dealers.

Garbled at times, the movie still hums along with attractive, smooth efficiency.

A fairly good thriller with mixed-bag elements: preposterous plot, smartly elegant direction, one of the worst recent performances by a major actress, and a dynamite stick of an action scene that can stand close to the greats.

The International almost seems like a Monty Python spoof on spy-game thrillers in which the phrase 'secret agent' is constantly replaced by 'banker,' resulting in lines like, '...If I die, 100 other bankers take my place.'

A bad picture filled with cryptic someones going through the motions of a spy thriller.

The International isn't top-form Tykwer, but it's handsome and adamant, and now's as good a time as any for some out-of-control greedy-banker-bashing.

The script tries to explain how this improbable alliance happened, but it never does make much sense, which is a recurrent theme in this overly complicated conspiracy tale.

The International is a sleek, engaging example of a peculiar form of escapist entertainment, a favorite, in fact: It's a thriller that eases us away from our present worries without fully erasing a resonance with life beyond the multiplex.

A slow road to nowhere, less clunky than The Interpreter but bogged down by its own cynicism.

Killer banks may be new to the movies, but there's nothing else original in this if-it's-Tuesday-this-must-be-Istanbul thriller, with its portentous globe-hopping and racing through colorful street bazaars.

I enjoyed The International. Clive Owen makes a semi-believable hero, not performing too many feats that are physically unlikely.

Some thrillers settle into a rut of adequacy, rarely spiking above or below the baseline. Not The International. Director Tom Tykwer's new picture is all over the place, geographically and in terms of audience satisfaction.

This unwieldy product, with its swathes of expository dialogue, might have been titled Expain Clive Explain.

Where Run Lola Run was like a perpetual-motion machine, The International seems to forever be stopping in its own tracks.

The International is a film I liked enough that I wished I liked it better.

Taut and amazingly timely, The International is a conspiracy thriller that harkens back to the perilously paranoid '70s.

The pace is fast and the action, particularly a mind-boggling shoot-'em-up in the Guggenheim Museum, furious enough. But the less-conventional elements are in many ways even more effective.

This movie is a fiction -- and it makes no sense at all.

The International scampers all over the place, but it's alternately frantic and a little slack, with a hole in the middle where some interesting characters ought to be.

One of those movies sponsored by an international conglomerate that lectures us about how all international conglomerates are corrupt.

It's a film that, mad as it sometimes seems, gives you things to chew on.

A film that squanders a golden opportunity to make money on the current economic meltdown.