Tobey Maguire, George Clooney, and Cate Blanchett in The Good German. Click here to watch the trailer.

Before we begin, I have something to confess, which is going to make me sound both ridiculous and sycophantic. Here it is: I love Warner Bros. Not the corporate entity itself, really, no, I love what Warner Bros. means. I love the history and the style with which they make movies. With MGM now a rickety distribution arm, Columbia swallowed by Sony, and Disney, well, Disneying along, Warner Bros. might be the strongest connection modern moviegoers have to the early days of film, to Zanuck and Bogart and the Merrie Melodies.

Warners's logo is iconic and simple, and the movies that open with it almost always promise quality. Seeing the logo usually means I'm going to like the film that's coming. This year alone, they've had V for Vendetta, Superman Returns, The Departed, and Blood Diamond. And now, along comes Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, based on Joseph Kanon's novel.

The trailer opens with the green rating screen fading to black, since the movie is in black and white. Good start. We open on a man walking away from the camera, smoking, and the smoke has that gorgeous weight and texture particular to black and white film. I half-expect the movie to have one of those self-righteous nannying disclaimers that cigarette smoke can kill you, but it doesn't, which for me only reinforces the milieu, as a narrator is telling us this is Berlin, 1945. And then the logo fades in, wreathed in smoke, and it's just so richly evocative of a different time I fall limp in my desk chair.

"The war is over," our narrator tells us, but the war in me is just starting as George Clooney steps off a plane in uniform. Rowr. We learn that George is a journalist reporting on the state of post-V-E Day Germany. Various images — a man creeping through a dark hallway, a hand moving shakily for a doorknob, the door opening to reveal a gun pointed to the floor — push together as the narrator intones, "If war is hell, what comes after?" And then George, standing in the rain, turns as if to look back at Ingrid Bergman and ... dammit, he's just such a movie star.

Stills From Cate Blanchett's Films

Beau Bridges gives us some more of the plot as he exposits, "An American serviceman turns up dead on the eve of the peace conference?" Presumably, this is the story George will be covering. We see some shots of Russian forces marching through Berlin very precisely as Beau continues, "The Russians want this to go away. We want it to go away, too," to George, who sits across a desk from Beau, smirking hotly.

And now George is in the very sexy world of what looks like a military library, consulting with the magnificently weaselly Leland Orser over access to ... something. I can't quite tell what. We then see George's driver, a fresh-faced kid in uniform who turns out to be Tobey Maguire. And Tobey maybe needs to take some pointers from his cohorts Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon and grow up a bit. I know he's the star of a multimillion-dollar franchise and all, but he still looks like a twelve-year-old. George tells us that the Americans and the Russians are looking for Tobey, which I don't think is the best thing to have going for you in 1945 Berlin. And then Tobey starts beating the stuffing out of George and we are really not okay with this.

Beau asks George where he got some bruises (which we can't see), intercut with Tobey applying said bruises. Tobey, I think, needs a time-out. Beau asks, "It wasn't over a girl, was it?" And I begin to wonder exactly what kind of girl goes for Tobey over George.

"I show up in Berlin and the driver assigned to me is running around with my ex-girlfriend," George wonders as said girl comes out of the shadows of an apartment, all slinky and mysterious and Cate Blanchett-y. We hear Tobey making infatuated promises to get Cate out of Berlin as she says, sounding remarkably like Alison Doody in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, "You should never have come back to Berlin." Oooh.

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We see Cate walking a bicycle through a decimated neighborhood, and them smoking seductively as George questions her. And now it looks like she's in the sewer — is she looking for a dead crusader with a map to the Holy Grail down there? George delivers his Bogart-iest line ever, saying, "I would have gotten you out — I still would" as he does the patented look from the eyes down to the mouth that means "I'm going to kiss you now, and it's going to be excellent." George is really good at that look, and Cate does not prove immune to it, even as she rebuts, "You can never really get out of Berlin."

The score gets increasingly insistent while some mustached man tells George that the atom bomb is the future and he looks at a huge Stars and Stripes headline of the same theme. Cate very subtly walks her bike out in front of an enormous glorious-leader portrait of Stalin, as Leland tells George, "She's playing you Jake. You have no idea what you're dealing with." When George confronts Cate he has a bandage on his ear, so I'm choosing to believe that calling him Jake is a direct allusion to Jack Nicholson's sliced nose in Chinatown. Although Joseph Kanon could probably tell me that's completely wrong.

The music gets even more insistent over a shot of a sleek and gleaming aircraft in the rain, a nearly identical shot to the plane at the end of Casablanca. More gunshots, threats, Cate looking suspicious, George looking panicked, George bleeding, and then the ominous titles: "At the end of the war, not everyone finds peace." We see some grainy, newsreel-like footage of tanks and soldiers as well as someone who sounds like Harry Truman saying, "Let's not forget that we are fighting for peace — and for the welfare of mankind" over shots of postwar Berlin — a woman singing in a club, money flying through the air, assault, and George helping an injured Cate from a building and into a crowd. The cigarette smoke returns to embrace the title: The Good German.

This kind of glorious noirish big-star thriller just looks so appealing that I'm surprised there aren't four made every year. Clooney's collaborations with Soderbergh, by and large, lean toward the fantastic, and the director makes good actresses great. This, I hope, will be a winner.