Times are tough for the thriller fan who likes to see spies practice, well, spycraft. More than ever, the best spy movies are actually TV shows—grounded small-screen gems like Slow Horses, The Agency, or The Night Manager. Meanwhile, secret agents at the movies seem to have taken to heart Ian Fleming's original characterization of James Bond as a "blunt instrument": they mostly excel at blowing stuff up.
In reality, a successful spy's body count is, by definition, zero. Instead, what's at stake are secrets—and, more often than not, the agent's own sanity. It's hard to say what caused the classic espionage thriller to go the way of the buddy-cop movie—shrinking attention spans? The current mess of a geopolitical situation? Tony Gilroy being too busy with Andor?—but here we are.
Not to worry, though. A few filmmakers are carrying the torch for realistic tradecraft, first lit by Martin Ritt’s 1965 adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, well into the 21st century. Here are ten of my favorite "they don't make 'em like they used to" spy movies since 2000.
Brad Pitt (playing a Québécois!) and Marion Cotillard star as lovers in an underappreciated WWII thriller whose second half elegantly flips the first on its head. Director Robert Zemeckis opens on a parachutist over the Sahara, shot in a way that keeps messing with the sense of scale; it's a mission statement for a film getting ready to knock the ground from under you.
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I have not included the Bourne series here, deservedly iconic but realistic in style only. Instead, check out this tough little 2018 film, also written by Gilroy. The story, set in Lebanon in 1982, may be the closest an American has ever come to channeling prime le Carré; Jon Hamm turns in one of his best performances as a gone-to-seed diplomat caught in a CIA sting.
Sex, lies and satellite feeds: a spy is handed a list of potential moles, one of whom is his wife. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play the world's coolest middle-aged couple; the clockwork plot involves two interlocking schemes it took me a rewatch to fully grasp. Steven Soderbergh and writing partner David Koepp are determined to remind you how it's done, baby—and if this film had made more at the box office, we'd be entering a genre renaissance right now.
Speaking of moles, here's a real one. Based on the story of Robert Hanssen, an FBI veteran who spent years passing intel to Russia, this film follows a rookie agent (Ryan Philippe) recruited to spy on him. Chris Cooper is terrifying and oddly vulnerable as Hanssen. Director Billy Ray and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto bathe Breach in dull fluorescent office light, reminding us that spycraft is a soul-sucking business no matter which side you're on.
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Steven Spielberg's Munich may be a finer film, that slow-motion sex scene notwithstanding, but Spielberg's Bridge of Spies is a better spy film. Tom Hanks plays a lawyer sent to Berlin to organize a three-sided prisoner swap between the US, the USSR, and the increasingly testy East Germans; the Coen brothers had a hand in the script, and it shows in the way all this frantic activity teeters on the edge of comedy without quite falling over. Mark Rylance won an Oscar for his supremely unflappable take on Soviet agent Rudolf Abel.
The Courier is a cool two-hander at heart, with Georgian actor Merab Ninidze as a secretly dissident Soviet apparatchik more than holding his own against Benedict Cumberbatch as a British businessman tasked with smuggling his intel to the West. Another real-ish Cold War story, it starts off jaunty before exploding into tragedy in the final act.
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Remember the name "Valerie Plame?" Well, you weren't supposed to know it in the first place, and the very fact that you might is evidence of a crime. The perpetrators are the Bush administration, who outed Plame as a CIA operative in retribution for her husband's refusal to co-sign the lie about Saddam's WMDs. Doug Liman's film is unflinching about the human cost of such games; it's also a great, rare primer on what it is a CIA case officer actually does.
This smart, cool, hyperkinetic story of a young woman (Phoebe Dynevor) who discovers her father is a spy and a crook is exactly what a modern spy thriller could and should be. Its greatest weakness—shot on literal iPhones, it frankly looks like shit—is also a strength, as director Neil Burger and his team are free to stage scenes amid the real-life bustle of Seoul and Mumbai.
A modern classic of surveillance and obsession, set in the dread-drenched Brutalist housing blocks of East Berlin. A Stasi agent assigned to watch a politically questionable playwright gradually becomes his subject's dark shadow and guardian angel. Forget spy thrillers; if you like movies at all, you should have seen this one already.
The freshest entry on this list is a distinctly 1970s-style paranoid thriller with an irresistible hook: Riz Ahmed's character, a fixer for repentant whistleblowers (a narrow specialty, admittedly), uses a real-life phone service for Deaf people to keep his comms analog and anonymous. You can see the big twist coming at least a few minutes before it arrives, but everything before that is definitely worth the ride.
Michael Idov's latest novel The Cormorant Hunt is in stores today.