![dek](https://content.time.com/time/daily/2007/0710/dt_clayton_1015.jpg)
Clayton (George Clooney) is a "fixer" at a big law firm; he has the wiles to get clients out of embarrassing scrapes. Now, trying to clean up a mess in a class action, he needs his own fixer: somebody wants to kill him. Writer-director Tony Gilroy slickly blends the paranoid-thriller genre with the study of a smooth operator backed into an emotional crisis. And Clooney is terrific as a smart, stricken hero.