All the Old Knives

"A smart, low-key spy thriller."

"The storytelling moves along at a steady hum, maintaining intrigue as different pieces of the puzzle come together."

"Too frequently it tries to convince its audience that it is far smarter than it actually is."

"Characters tend to feel flattened into simpler, less interesting archetypes than they would be on the page."

"Slickness can be appealing. It can also be phony. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Here it’s mostly appealing, but less so as the plot further twistifies and the phoniness quotient rises."

"The film majors in obfuscation, as if directness or tangible stakes would somehow be its undoing."

"It is the classic Le Carré conflation of three different sorts of betrayal: personal, professional and patriotic."

"Silkily persuasive in its own hot-sleuthy way."

"Come for the espionage thrills, stay for the wrenching dissection of what it means to really love someone."

"The film’s prevailing solemnity ultimately makes its shards of paranoia and disclosures about the compromises of counterterrorism agents more unsettling, and the brutal finality of its outcome more chilling."

"A minor but engrossing genre movie."

"Espionage thrillers usually traffic in globe-trotting mayhem, so it’s refreshing to find one whose main ingredients are two stars out-smoldering each other over dinner."