"You should never have come back to Berlin," war correspondent Jake Geisner (Clooney) is told by his old flame and SS officer's wife Lena Brandt (Blanchett).

It's good advice...because in the course of Steven Soderbergh's never less than intriguing thriller noir, gorgeous George gets to resemble a nattily-dressed punch-bag.

To kick off, he's on the receiving end of a beating from Tobey Maguire's corrupt motorpool driver Corporal Tully, a sort of vicious version of Dad's Army's black marketeer Private Walker.

Jake, who is in Berlin to cover the post-WWII Potsdam Peace Conference, has suddenly discovered that Tully's German squeeze is his former lover Lena, who worked as a stringer for him when he was a bureau chief before the war.

It turns out Tully is trying to smuggle Lena, now a nighclub hostess, out of Germany...but he winds up floating face down in a Potsdam lake in the Russian sector with $100,000 stuffed in his pocket.

The Americans and Russians want the murder hushed up but Jake's probings reveal that both superpowers are keen to trace Lena's supposedly dead husband - an SS officer up to his neck in something shady.

Director Stephen Soderbergh employs monochrome photography (he used vintage camera lenses), an old-fashioned score and even wobbly rear-projections to recreate the noirish atmosphere of Casablanca and The Third Man.

Berlin - or what's left of it - looks splendid, a fallen city where only listing grand facades and piles of rubble remain.

However, this is no rudimentary pastiche but a meticulously crafted thriller (based on Joseph Kanon's novel) whose retro stylings enrich rather than detract from the switchbacks and red herrings of the narrative.

Clooney weathers the batterings - from Russian grunts to duplicitous Yanks - with aplomb, nailing a cynical character who is initially naïve about the corrupt political manoevring hidden behind the façade of the peace talks.

This is particularly strong when dealing with the craven lunges for power as the Russians, Americans and British jostle for position to best snatch up the spoils of the shattered Third Reich.

However, it's very much a human story where nobody is completely honest about who they are or what they want and Cate Blanchett turns in a nifty Marlene Dietrich/Ingmar Bergman impression.

Tim Evans