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Anton Corbijn

The opening minutes of Anton Corbijn’s The American provide a near perfect taste as to the style and sensibilities of the movie that will follow. Against a backdrop of gorgeous scenery in an isolated European locale, a man commits an act of violence so sudden and detached that it seems as though it did not happen at all. The man (played by George Clooney) is a weary hit-man on the run from unknown pursuers who are hunting him for down for some previously committed deed. Fleeing to a small Italian village, our protagonist, now going by the name of Edward, befriends a local priest and beds a local prostitute, and is soon convinced by his shady employer to take one final job building a custom-designed rifle for another assassin. Despite doing almost nothing to escape the narrative pitfalls of the hit-man genre, The American is a film that still manages to stands out because of its refusal to descend into either cheap thrills or overstated melodrama, resulting in a quiet and restrained thriller with a deep undercurrent of yearning eroticism and unmistakable regret.