It's hopelessly premature to dub Tony Gilroy's '70s-style paranoia-thriller Michael Clayton the best movie of 2007, but what the hell: Tony Gilroy's 70s-style-paranoia-thriller Michael Clayton is the best movie of 2007.

George Clooney stars as the titular Clayton, and it's his most commanding performance since Three Kings. Clooney has a tendency to indulge his costars in his more bloated projects (See Ocean's 11-13), but here, as a hard-living fixer at a New York City law firm trying to come to terms with middle-age while assisting an erratic litigator (played by the inimitable Tom Wilkinson) investigate a spiraling corporate conspiracy, Clooney delivers his first truly iconic performance.

To reveal more of the plot would be a disservice to the film's ingenious construction, which is deceptively simple, and, in the end, improbably affecting. On the surface, the whole movie is an obvious ode to De Palma's Blow Out, and Coppola's The Conversation, the two most unnerving, conspiracy-theory thrillers to emerge from the post-Watergate primordial soup. But Clooney and first-time director Gilroy (he wrote the screenplays for the Jason Bourne trilogy) put a post-modern spin on the film-school brats by refusing to equate obsession with redemption.

Gilroy indulges in the genre conventions of chase scenes, exploding cars, and shadowy corporate figures (played with varying degrees of scumminess by Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack, and Ken Howard), but gives things heft by pausing frequently for Michael's quiet scenes with people he has managed to disappoint, including his siblings, ex-wife, and young son (indeed, the scene where Clooney talks to his son about his younger brother's failings is the kind of precise, heartbreaking language that wins actors and screenwriters Oscars).

The aforementioned De Palma and Coppola movies ended with their truth-telling heroes alone and isolated, yet somehow nobler as a result of their entanglements with The Man. Michael Clayton doesn't offer any such reprieve—the lingering final shot of Michael in midtown traffic is a final affirmation that losing your soul is now just a standard cost of doing business.—Ray Gustini