Running time: 119 minutes. . . .

TONY GILROY, writer of the Bournemovies, sheds his anonymity for a director's credit with this sophisticated psychological thriller. It trades the high-octane sparks of Bourne for a moody, pensive journey through the long shadow of corporate politics. He also entices one of the most engaging performances of George Clooney's career.

Clooney plays Michael Clayton, a 'fixer' for a corporate legal firm whose life is unhinging. Shaken from a divorce, seeing his son intermittently, he also has to pay off a crippling debt from a crumbled business project. But his day job is throwing up even greater problems.

He holds an anonymous but vital position in the firm, sweeping corporate problems under the rug. The company is about to settle a $35bn class-action lawsuit for bio-tech firm U-North. The case stinks of dodgy bio-ethics and its senior handler, lawyer Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) cracks under the pressure. He wants to lift the lid rather than close the deal.

Clayton must sort it out. In the background hovers Tilda Swinton's Karen Crowder, a merciless U-North litigator.

Swinton's vampire demeanor conveys a woman whose lifeblood has been sucked dry. She practices her corporate routine in front of a mirror . . . repeating the lines with stony gravity in the hope that she will start to believe her own spin.

Clooney's smoulder gains a rarely seen vulnerability. His silver regality here becomes a grey pallor . . . a man who knows he has run out of smooth lines. The film's title points the way: this is about Michael Clayton, how he must solve, in one move, the entire weight of his problems or collapse underneath them. So in a sense, it is about the burden of modern life.

And Clooney looks like Atlas, trying to hold the earth up.

But the film has a sting in its tale about corporate culture. It shows it as an all-consuming, faceless entity that chews and spits out the bits that make us human, playing very fast and loose with ethics. This is very neatly written by Gilroy, while Clooney and Swinton inhabit their roles, expertly conveying the vice-like corporate squeeze.

Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer): Andy Samberg, Isla Fisher, Bill Hader, Ian McShane.

Running time: 83 minutes.

THIS silly 1980s cheesefest was written for Will Ferrell. Instead we get Andy Samberg. But unlike Ferrell, who knows that the best comedy comes from sparking off other actors, Andy Samberg prefers to hog the film with a selfconscious schtick. Instead of ice skating we get daredevil motorcycling and a Europe CD on the soundtrack . . . a non-stop nostalgia fest that looks like a watered-down Jackass and Napoleon Dynamite.

Samberg plays an atrocious young stuntman who believes his deceased father worked with Evil Knievel. His stepdad (Ian McShane) tries to kick him into shape. Isla Fisher is the saccharine girl-next-door. It is drenched in parody and irony . . . at first, such 1980s knowingness is amusing, and the slapstick disasters tickle.

But writer Pam Brady doesn't develop the story beyond thin sentimentality, while Samberg's posturing gets pretty tiring.

Yella (Christian Petzold): Nina Hoss, Devid Striesow, Hinnerk Schonemann, Burghart Klaussner, Barbara Auer.

Running time: 89 minutes.

THIS German thriller by writer/director Christian Petzold is the antithesis of the new German comedies: it is a chilling mood piece with ice in its veins.

Just when you think you have it pinned, it wriggles out of your grasp. Petzold makes not just the plot elusive, but its emotions too . . .

a classy exercise in audience manipulation. Nina Hoss plays a haunted accountant who accepts a job in Hanover to escape her exhusband . . . a brutal young man whose anger explodes like a crack of thunder. She ends up on the road with a poker-faced venture capitalist who analyses her every move. It is shot with the clarity of a cold winter morning, and picks up on a modern soullessness: cold concrete, empty hotels, big cars, grim emotions and a voracious hunger for money. But it has a dash too of surrealism, and a twist with no signposting whatsoever.