A Most Wanted Man

A half-Chechnyan, half-Russian immigrant washes ashore on the docks of Hamburg, Germany and is immediately taken note of by the head of an anti-terror unit (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who hopes to use this potential threat as bait to fry a bigger fish, that is if his superiors and a visiting American emissary (Robin Wright) don't get in his way. A Most Wanted Man, an adaptation of a recent John le Carre novel, is a bit of a tease for its genre, often drumming up the suspense music and offering little payoff while Anton Corbijn, a filmmaker who has offered strong work in the past (Control, The American) mostly lets the movie sit on the screen, often to the point of tedium. It features one of the final performances of Hoffman (I think the final Hunger Games pictures where we will see him partly CGI'd will be his last) and it is a commanding one though I wasn't wild about his German accent nor that of Willem Dafoe, Rachel McAdams and the other Americans in the cast.