The Good German

The Good German (2006) is a war-era noir thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh — watch it online on iFILM. It's the summer of 1945. Berlin is rubble and Allied negotiators are carving up Europe in Potsdam. George Clooney plays Jake Geismar, an American war correspondent who arrives to cover the peace talks and immediately starts looking for someone he left behind.

That someone is Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), a German woman who survived the last years of the war in ways she won't discuss. Her husband has vanished and, it turns out, every intelligence service in the city wants to know where he is. Jake's driver, a sharp-elbowed young GI named Tully (Tobey Maguire), has already found a way into Lena's orbit and into the black market running beneath the ruins. One dead body is enough to pull everyone into the same dangerous circle.

Soderbergh shot the film deliberately in the style of 1940s studio pictures: black-and-white, period lenses, boom-mic sound and hard cuts. The result is part homage to Casablanca, part Cold War puzzle. Stream The Good German (2006) online on iFILM in full quality.