THE POLITICAL THRILLER is a delicate game; for it to work, the filmmaker must deftly maneuver between the personal (hence the thrills) and political without seeming too preachy. The Interpreter is a Democrat's movie (hence Sean Penn), but its party line doesn't keep it from succeeding where last summer's Manchurian Candidate remake fell short. Nicole Kidman plays Silvia Broome, a United Nations interpreter who becomes embroiled in an assassination plot when she overhears threats made on a genocidal African leader's life. As investigator Tobin Keller (Penn) quickly finds out, though, the facts of the case are murky and misleading. Suffice it to say, Silvia has an involved, enigmatic history with the country and leader in question – Kidman's inscrutable blond would've sent Hitchcock's head spinning. While her flattened chemistry with Penn doesn't afford the film an emotional core, The Interpreter gets enough meat from metaphorical substance (the U.N., diplomacy, etc.) and director Sydney Pollack's taut suspense sequences to mostly plug its holes. And, yes, it's hard not to find an ambiguous popcorn movie refreshing in a time when tunnel vision so dominates political discourse: that our alliances to characters and narrative aren't so clearly demarcated as in a state-of-the-union address seems a good thing indeed. (Max Goldberg)