Spies and Spying
Black Doves (2024) – Pulp Trashy Fun
Genre – Spy (Crime?) Action Time: 6 x 55 minutes episodes Platform: Netflix Cast: Keira Knightly. Ben Whishaw. Sarah Lancashire. Andrew Buchan. You don’t like serious stuff. You want your entertainment clean and without any great philosophy about the nature of spies and spying. In short you want gunfights, explosions and witty dialogues. In…
Read MoreHopscotch (1980) – Delightful
Clickable links in red. Genre – Spy Movie + comedy Time: 1 Hour , 45 minutes Platform: You Tube – Free Director: Ronald Neame Cast: Walter Mathau. Glenda Jackson. Ned Beatty. Sam Waterston. Herbert Lom. Delightful is not a word that one would normally use when the subject is a spy movie. But…
Read MoreThe Americans 2013 – 2017 – Fascinating
All clickable links in red Genre – Spy Movie Time: 6 Seasons. 5 seasons x 13 episodes x average 45 minutes. 6th season – 10 episodes x average 40 minutes Platform: Disney Hotstar Illegals and Russia – a “mini history”: In June 2010, ten Illegals were arrested by the FBI’s counter…
Read MoreThe Old Man. Season 1 (2022). Season 2 (2024) – The Past is Never Dead and Buried
Genre: Spy Movie Time: 7 episodes x average 50 minutes Platform: Disney Hotstar SEASON 1 “You get to be my age in this business and one way or another, you will have something personal with just about everyone”. “Better way is to keep things buried in the ground than to wish them…
Read MoreUlajh (2024) – Dull and Uneven
Clickable links in red Genre – Spy + Conspiracy thriller Time: 2 Hours, 8 minutes Platform: NetFlix Director: Sudhanshu Saria Cast: Janhvi Kapoor. Roshan Mathew. Gulshan Devaiah. Many spy thrillers commonly talk of honey trapping which is sexually entrapping a male and blackmailing him to obtain secrets. The opposite of that is…
Read MoreThe Veil (2024) – Contemporary but …
Director: Daina Reid. Damon Thomas (3 episodes each) Genre: Spy thriller Time: TV series – 6 x 55-minute episodes Platform: Disney + Hotstar Cast: Elisabeth Moss. Yumna Marwan. Dali Benssalah. Imogen Salter (Elisabeth Moss) is an MI6 operative who takes down rogue traders. She is sent to a refugee camp on…
Read MoreBerlin (2023) – Brilliant slow burn
Genre: Spy Story Time: 1 Hour 50 minutes Platform: Zee 5 Writer Director: Atul Sabharwal Cast: Aparshakti Kurana. Rahul Bose. Ishwak Singh. People have complaints, and my favorite is that the James Bond franchise has distorted people’s perception of spy films. If pressed, they will reluctantly concede that while it’s not real, it’s great…
Read MoreFirefox (1982) – How Clint Won The Cold War!
Clickable links in red Director: Clint Eastwood Genre: Spy cum techno Thriller Time: 1 Hour 57 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime (rent) Cast: Clint Eastwood. Freddie Jones It is 1980 and The Cold War is intensifying. Both sides are intensifying the race to create deadlier weapons. British Intelligence obtains information that the Soviet Union…
Read MoreThe Assassination of Trotsky (1972) – Interesting
All clickable links in red Director: Joseph Losey Genre: Spy Drama (True Story) Time: 1 Hour 38 minutes Platform: You Tube Cast: Richard Burton. Alain Delon. Romy Schneider. French Superstar Alain Delon, personified French cool in his best period during the 1960s and 1970s, where he played a wide range of interesting roles that ranged…
Read MoreNorth by Northwest (1959) – Classic Hitchcock
All clickable links in red Director: Alfred Hitchcock Genre: Spy thriller Time: 2 Hours 16 minutes Cast: Cary Grant. Eva Marie Saint. James Mason. Martin Landau. Platform: Amazon Prime Rent As mentioned in my post on Notorious (see here), Alfred Hitchcock made 11 spy movies, which were marketed as suspense thrillers. Hitchcock’s films are…
Read MoreMr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) – Scenes from a Spy marriage !
Director: Multiple directors Genre: Spy thriller. Drama. Time: TV series – 8 x 55-minute episodes Platform: Amazon Prime Cast: Donald Glover. Maya Erskine. Wagner Moura. Parker Posey. (Hopefully Ingmar Bergman fans will forgive me for that title) . A mysterious agency gives two strangers new identities. “John” (Donald Glover) and “Jane” (Maya Erskine) Smith…
Read MoreKleo – Season 2 (2024) – Goofy Quirky Fun
Clickable links in red. Director: Isabel Braak. Nina Vukovic Genre: Spy thriller Time: TV series – 6 x 55-minute episodes Platform: Netflix Cast: Jella Haase. Dimitrij Schaad. Julius Feldmeier. The open ending of Season 1 (see here for the post on Kleo Season 1) left no doubt that the infamous red suitcase, which Kleo…
Read MoreEye of the Needle (1981) – Superb spy thriller
All clickable links in red Genre: Spy Movie Time: 1 hour 50 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime (rent or subscription) Director : Richard Marquand Cast : Donald Sutherland. Kate Nelligan. Christopher Cazenove. Ian Bannen. It’s the proud boast of British Intelligence that they controlled all the German agents in Britain during…
Read MoreThe Assets (2014) – Superb view of counter espionage
All clickable links in red Genre – Real-world Spying Time: 8 Hours – 8 x 50-minute episodes Platform: YouTube – free When the Soviet Union passed into history in 1991, the Western Powers thought that all the nasty stuff that went with it also had gone into history, including the KGB,…
Read MoreAdolf Eichmann Case – two films
All clickable links in red Today, Israeli Intelligence’s reputation is in tatters, thanks to the “sudden” Gaza war. However, this was not so in the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s, when there were many brilliant, “out of the box” operations and sudden mysterious deaths of Israel’s opponents that gave the Mossad a reputation for…
Read MoreThe Robert Hanssen Case – two films
All clickable links are in red Truth is always stranger than fiction. It is a cliché but like all good cliches it is also true. Otherwise, how do you explain that an FBI counter espionage agent, dedicated to catching Russian spies and Americans spying for Russians, was a Russian spy? For 22 years? The…
Read MoreThe Falcon and the Snowman (1985) – Superb true story
All clickable links in red Genre: Spy Story (True Story) Time: 2 Hours, 10 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime (on rent) As the adage goes, the more you try to change something, the more things remain the same. Hollywood (and Bollywood) tries to convince us that “spies” wear nice suits, drive cool cars, bed…
Read MoreThe Ultra Secret – Superb Slow Burn Films on Enigma
All clickable links in red In 1974 a book, The Ultra Secret, was published. The contents were nothing short of sensational for anyone who bought it. Lest people thought it was a joke, more documents under The Thirty-Year Rule were released on the topic. Simply put, The British were reading ALL GERMAN-CIPHERED SIGNALS, SOMETIMES IN NEAR…
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