A Most Wanted Man

Director: Anton Corbijn
122 mins Film4 Archive

A Chechen Muslim gets caught up in the war on terror in Andrew Bovell's adaptation of John le Carré's novel, directed by Anton Corbijn and starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

A Most Wanted Man takes place in present day Hamburg, Germany where a mysterious, tortured and near-dead half-Chechen, half-Russian man on the run arrives in the city’s Islamic community, desperate for help and looking to recover his late Russian father’s ill-gotten fortune. Nothing about this young man seems to add up: is he a victim or a thief or, worse still, an extremist intent on destruction? Drawn into this web of intrigue is a private British banker and a young female lawyer determined to defend the defenceless. All the while, they are being watched by the brilliant, roguish chief of a covert German spy unit (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who fights to put the pieces together as the clock ticks.