Sight & Sound, the monthly published by the British Film Institute, generally speaking is an erudite and reliable source of essays and reviews on world cinema.

I usually pick up the mag at my local Borders Books & Music (909 N. Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa), but Sight & Sound, along with Film Comment and Cineaste, have gone missing the last few weeks. Nobody there can tell me why, except to say that recent magazine shipments have been unpredictable.

So, perusing the S&S online site (wisely, it offers only bits of the content available in print), I came across Samuel Wigley’s review of The International, the wannabe thriller directed by German-born filmmaker Tom Tykwer (read my review).

Aside from a few spectacular Hitchockian set pieces, including those set at Milan’s town square, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and a mock-up of Manhattan’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum, there’s very little notable about Tykwer’s movie.

Stars Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, as an Interpol agent and a U.S. district attorney, respectively, investigating the criminal activities of a global bank, appear to be merely going through the paces. These otherwise resourceful actors offer facial expressions and body language as fixed and monotonous as the character development is undercooked and the dialogue is clumsy.

Really, Tykwer’s movie is one of the least intriguing and most bland international-conspiracy thriller flicks I’ve seen in a long while.

And yet the S&S reviewer (sorry, not trying to pick on this particular critic, just saying …) calls it “one of the most entertaining espionage dramas in an age.”

Really? How about the Bourne movies? How about, for a more intimate, non-globetrotting spy movie, Billy Ray’s underappreciated Breach, released in 2007?

Wigley adds, “Keeping a lid on comic-book excess, rooted in a cogent if run-of-the-mill intrigue and concentrated around plausible yet still astonishing set pieces, the result plays something like the idealised back-to-basics Bond film that Fleming fans carry around in their heads.”

Click here to read the entire review.

By the way, the March issue of S&S, the one I’ve been scrambling to find, has a cover story and several accompanying pieces on one of my favorite filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick. On offer: “… a critical account of sex in his films, alongside a look back at the exquisite Barry Lyndon and an interview with the Wilson Twins about their exploration of the director’s unmade project Aryan Papers.”

I just may have to break down and subscribe.