There's a dual sense of regret filling the air in the wintry new thriller A Most Wanted Man. Set in Hamburg, a city laden with guilt for unwittingly housing the 9/11 hijackers while they hatched their plan, the film follows a dogged, weary intelligence officer, Günther Bachmann, as he tries to turn a radicalized young Chechen Muslim into an asset. His career in a moderate amount of disgrace, and his city haunted by past failures, Günther plods along with the bleak determination of someone who will admit defeat, but refuses to accept it.

That sense of despondency is compounded by the fact that Günther is played by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor for whom "great" is probably too small a word. This being one of the last of his roles, one spends the entirety of A Most Wanted Man trying to soak up as much of him as possible, each satisfying new tic or flourish a sad countdown to when there are no more left. His performance in this film is a quieter one, as Günther is often subdued in a haze of drink and smoke and troubled thoughts. But Hoffman's genius is still immediately visible, there in every terse but playful exchange with an American CIA liaison (a steely, smooth Robin Wright), in every rumpled, lonely moment of reflection. He absorbs the texture of the film around him while also giving it new definition. Few actors seem to so fully understand their profession the way Hoffman did. His accent is even on point, subtle instead of stagey, aware of its limits but not desperate to overcompensate. The performance is a great, unshowy bit of work, though it is undeniably sad to watch.

One great testament to Hoffman's thoughtful artistry is that it doesn't consume the rest of director Anton Corbijn's film. Based on a novel by John le Carré (who's written a beautiful remembrance of Hoffman in the Times), the film follows Günther and his stealthy, but not inhumanly so, team (including the excellent Nina Hoss) as they pursue Issa (the handsome, mournful Grigoriy Dobrygin), who has illegally entered Germany after some brutal time spent being tortured in Turkish and Russian prisons. It's not immediately clear what, if any, bad deeds Issa is looking to commit, and the film is not eager to rush to any judgments.

Complicating the moral landscape is Annabel Richter, an immigrant rights attorney whose blind commitment to her work sometimes mean she could be willingly abetting potential terrorists. She is played by Rachel McAdams, who has a little less success with her accent than Hoffman does, but nonetheless proves as intelligent, soulful, and magnetic a presence as ever. And I must say, as much as I adored About Time, it is nice to see her doing something that isn't a dewy romance about time travel. More like this please, Ms. McAdams.

Rather than be thwarted by Annabel's meddling, Günther smartly bends her toward his will, both aggressively and subtly. This kind of tradecraft—the careful, psychological working of assets—is a dying art in the world of the film. (And very likely in real life.) Sure it's manipulative and often cruel work, but as Günther points out in an angry monologue, compared to what tends to happen when the Americans come blundering through, isn't it the better option? The film is pretty insistent that it is, though it's not very optimistic about the practice's survival.

At root, A Most Wanted Man is a bitter, despairing film, one angry at government's rejection of ambiguity and nuance in favor of quantifiable results, no matter how pig-headedly, and violently, they're realized. The movie's ending is abrupt and, though it's been a fine experience watching the film, disappointing. That Philip Seymour Hoffman is the one with us all the way to those shivery ending credits sends you out of the theater feeling doubly bereft. It's a frustrating, unfair world we live in. At least we had Philip Seymour Hoffman for a bit of time, helping us to illuminate it.