THE Good German is shot in blackand-white on sets designed to imitate those from the 1940s. It uses hokey devices of the era, such as back projection and swipe cuts, and it is filmed with old-style cameras that have a limited fivelens range and have to remain stationary. In a technological era, where the only limit to what can be depicted on screen is imagination, it seems a perverse experiment that prompts one major question: why bother?

The film is set amongst the ruins of Berlin in the aftermath of the second world war. American journalist Jake Geismer (Clooney) returns to the city he left as war broke out to find the woman he loves, Lena Brandt (Blanchett).

But Brandt is a shapely enigma with dark secrets and Geismer's efforts to unravel these are stymied by bureaucracy and odious American soldier Tully (Maguire, playing against type and his apple-pie looks).

Steven Soderbergh has long been regarded as a master of the "one for the studio, and one for me" approach to film-making but in truth his films tend to fall into more than two categories. There are his award-baiting efforts (Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Sex, Lies and Videotape), his slick popcorn entertainment (Out of Sight, Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve) and his tiny-budgeted experiments, rarely watched but rarely unwatchable (Schizopolis, The Limey and Kafka). The Good German is different again, fitting alongside Solaris in being a slightly self-indulgent experiment requiring a decent budget and therefore some of the name actors on Soderbergh's impressive contacts list.

He's clearly in thrall to classic film noir and many of the genre's conventions are present and correct . . . convoluted plot, femme fatale and a hero constantly being beaten up for his inquisitive nature . . . but despite all the efforts to look like a 1940s film we are constantly reminded that this is very much a modern creation, with lots of anachronistic swearing, references to classic films and a sex scene that would never have got by the censors 70 years ago.

These jarring incongruities are a shame as they only distract from what is otherwise an impressive film of substance, with the labyrinthine plot being expertly mapped out against intelligent discourse on the difficulties and dangers of a wartime occupation.

Presumably Soderbergh decided the experiment would be a neat homage, but you'd expect such an accomplished director to look for ways of pushing a genre forward rather than looking back. It's a stylistic mis-step that makes this an oddity more for the cinephile than the cinema fan.