Traitor's Layered Thrills Impress

Critics are impressed with terrorism thriller Traitor’s maze of a plot, superb acting, and moral ambiguity. The film squeezes “a vast and sometimes contradictory compendium of post-9/11 fears and anxieties into 110 swift minutes” while trying “to cover every side and cater to just about every possible ideological objection,” writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times.

“Don Cheadle reaffirms his excellence” in a “snakelike” film “about messing with our sympathies, craftily,” notes Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. And with “a sense of gripping, '70s-style grittiness,” Traitor “succeeds where similarly topical thrillers often fail because it plays its cards close to the vest,” writes Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. (More film stories.)