So yeah, we’ve been pretty bad with the “weekly” part of the title, but we decided to bring back the feature in lieu of this weekend’s premiere of Angelina Jolie’s Salt, we made a list of our favorite movies about spy games and espionage. Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments!
James Bond Series
To write this list without including James Bond would be a tragedy. The franchise made spies cool and sexy while going through changes with every lead from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig. High tech gadgets real and imagined, awesome cars, beautiful women, and shaken martinis have made James Bond the gold standard for spies in film.
Bourne Series
Salt and every other recent spy series is heavily in debt to Matt Damon’s muscly ass-kicker, who brought a complexity to the spy genre it had never seen. As a spy with no memory of being a spy, Jason Bourne was the ultimate bad ass, the guy that could literally evade the entire CIA in his effort to find out who he was. With unmatchable action sequences and an intriguing mystery clouding the story, the three films ushered in a new era for spy movies.
North by Northwest
Before Connery introduced himself as 007, Cary Grant was Roger Thornhill, an ad executive mistaken for a spy hot on the tail of a well known smuggler. As Thronhill flees from the bad guys and the cops, he joins forces with the beautiful Eva Marie Saint, trying to find out the truth of what’s really going on. It’s one of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, the perfect mixture of misdirection, sex, and naturally, suspense.
The Manchurian Candidate
Frank Sinatra turns in his finest performance ever as a soldier discovering a high reaching conspiracy to make a Soviet sleeper agent the President. One of the finest documents of Cold War paranoia and a crackerjack psychological thriller to boot, The Manchurian Candidate is just a great movie. Anyone for a little solitaire?
Three Days of the Condor
Robert Redford is the anti-Bond – a desk jockey with a boring job – who gets embroiled in something much larger than he can fathom. Three Days of the Condor doesn’t hold up great today, but it is still a taut thriller and a great reflection of how, in the wake of Watergate, America’s paranoia turned inward.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Chuck Barris’s memoir posited that in between stints hosting forgettable game shows, he killed people for the CIA. This outlandish premise is treated with appropriate goofiness by first time director George Clooney and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who supposedly clashed during production). Clooney’s style isn’t quite as assured here as in his follow-up (Good Night and Good Luck), but the film is carried by Kaufman’s zippy writing and a breakout performance by Sam Rockwell.
Burn After Reading
A far better deconstruction of spy movies and a biting satire of the Top Secret America that’s being aired out in the Washington Post this week, Burn After Reading utilizes an over-serious score and austere Washington settings as the backdrop for a ridiculous, farce. Burn After Reading was divisive at the time of its release, but detractors should revisit the film; in addition to being positively hilarious it seems absolutely prescient in light of what the Washington Post just dug up.
Sneakers
Phil Alden Robinson’s follow-up to Field of Dreams has been more or less forgotten, which is a pity because the movie is a highly entertaining diversion. Robert Redford plays a hacker/fugitive who leads a team of security specialists that get mixed up in some dangerous stuff. Set in the uncertain days following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sneakers channels the nostalgia that permeated Field of Dreams while trading the tear-jerking for fun spy stuff.
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