Yet everything else here — the gritty supporting players, the conspiracy theories and the Central Park finale — marks the pinnacle of 1970s paranoia thrillers, as Hoffman’s Jewish graduate student is sucked into a shadowy world of postwar spooks...

A project that seemed a leaden cinch to be the kind of visceral thriller that makes audiences almost sich with excitement has fouled up right from the word go, and nothing in it works quite the way it was meant to.

... Far-fetched but gripping.

Adapted by legendary author William Goldman from his 1974 novel of the same name, it was a bridge between the end of World War II and the peak of the Cold War, wrapped up in post-Nixon conspiratorial paranoia.