Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

Although the cast is uniformly fine, Hoffman shines in a role that demands not showmanship, but a kind of complexity and contradiction that can be rendered only through the kind of dull character details that he excelled in, accumulating them from the inside out.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

[A] crackerjack thriller, at once brooding, claustrophobic and unbearably tense.

Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper

A Most Wanted Man works as a crowd-pleaser and as a believable reflection of how these fictional events might well play out in the real world.

Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl

A Most Wanted Man is simply a complex tale superbly told, with time for nuance and to soak in its mysteries.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

A Most Wanted Man's cast - a mix of Germans speaking English, Americans speaking English with German accents, Russians, and men and women from the Middle East - is uniformly stellar.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Calvin Wilson

The rare film that will remain on your mind long after you’ve left the theater.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

The great pleasure of le Carré-land — for some, it’s the frustration — is that one’s own moral certainties are quickly stood on their head.

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

Every move Hoffman makes subtly rivets attention. There's the uncanny German accent, the boozing, the chain-smoking, the glances at his assistant (Nina Hoss), the secret life he keeps hidden and the betrayals even Günther can't see coming. Hoffman is simply magnificent. Face it. We won't see his like again.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore

Hoffman is merely the first among equals in a stellar cast.

Film.com by Kate Erbland

While the final act might not surprise or stun, it does feature some classic le Carre movements, some trademark Corbijn ease, and a terrifying Hoffman bellowing at the sky – not so bad for just another spy film.

Variety by Justin Chang

Corbijn succeeds here in large part because his attention to nuance and detail so fully complements that of the German operatives at the story’s core.

Entertainment Weekly

Crackles with a jigsaw-puzzle intelligence and features a superbly subtle lead performance from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who single-handedly gooses the post-9/11 procedural through some of its slower patches.

Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo

Anton Corbijn constructs a stifling world of shadowy surveillance and intersecting national interests, building on John Le Carré's sense of moral and emotional exhaustion.

The Dissolve by Nathan Rabin

A Most Wanted Man is a cold film that examines its characters from a clinical distance, but its iciness gives way to raw emotion in a powerful final sequence.

The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

The story is a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are of an indistinguishable gray, making fitting them together a tricky matter.

The Playlist by Cory Everett

The problem isn’t quite that the film is short on thrills (there is a paucity; the first adrenaline racing sequences don’t arrive until about an hour in), it’s that it’s not quite a character piece either.

The Guardian by Xan Brooks

It's a professional old-school espionage outing, intricate as clockwork and acted with relish by the ever-watchable Hoffman. But it remains an oddly anonymous enterprise from this talented and distinctive director.

Time Out

Disappointing plod of an espionage thriller.