The Good German
While in post-war Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference, Jake Geismar (George Clooney), an Army correspondent, is drawn into a murder investigation which involves his former mistress (Cate Blanchett) and his driver (Tobey Maguire).
20 August 1962, Voskresensk, Moscow Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR [now Russia]
14 May 1969, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
6 August 1960, San Francisco, California, USA
24 March 1972, Kranj, Slovenia
3 March 1972, Celle, Lower Saxony, Germany
23 August 1978, Buffalo, New York, USA
31 August 1940, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
26 February 1972, St. Moritz, Switzerland
16 January 1983, Leningrad, RSFSR, USSR [now St. Petersburg, Russia]
18 December 1878, Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire [now Republic of Georgia]
6 May 1961, Lexington, Kentucky, USA
27 June 1975, Santa Monica, California, USA
7 July 1969, Washington, District of Columbia, USA
27 June 1973, Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA
30 November 1874, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, UK
May 02, 2008
No matter that it's based on a book, the movie is more about how the reality of the time was seen through the lens of a Michael Curtiz while he was filming "Casablanca".
January 19, 2007
This cast almost makes The Good German watchable. It's just that their screenwriter and director don't do them any favors.
December 22, 2006
I have to admire an ostensibly nostalgic entertainment that so concertedly undermines the romanticism of wartime Hollywood.
July 14, 2007
The final verdict on this movie is that for all its attempts to replicate the great movies of the 1940s, it fails miserably.
April 23, 2009
A beautifully flawed experiment, "The Good German" is an entertaining if unbalanced war drama that places modern cinema mores on a classic style of American film when the Hayes code would never have allowed such overt sexual reality.
March 08, 2007
Why emphasise flaws in a film of such overall ambition and expertise?
January 19, 2007
There's a line between homage and mimicry, and Soderbergh has crossed it.
February 02, 2009
The Good German is the bad movie. Except for the ambience -- the look of the film -- it stumbles awkwardly on every level.
December 22, 2006
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.
May 23, 2007
While admirable as an example of directorial innovation and homage, The Good German fails to connect on a basic emotional level.
January 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.
