Thriller
The Amateur – 2025. Style over substance
Genre – Spy Thriller Time: 1 Hour 55 minutes Platform: Theatrical Release Director: James Hawes Cast: Rami Malek. Rachel Brosnahan. Laurence Fishburne So. I saw this 21st century update of the earlier 1981 film , both based on Robert Littell’s book. Without giving any major spoilers , lemme see if I can share my…
Read MoreThe Stranger (1946) – Superb Noir Mystery
All clickable links in red Genre – Mystery , Noir Time: 1 Hour 30 minutes Platform: Your Tube – Free Director: Orson Welles Cast: Orson Welles. Loretta Young. Edward G Robinson. Horror movies usually have a standard formula. Someone – usually the heroine or a female character – lets in a person or…
Read MoreBlack 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 MoreLeave the World Behind (2023) – Digital 9/11?
Clickable links in red Director: Sam Esmail Cast: Julia Roberts. Mahershala Ali. Ethan Hawke. Myha’la. Kevin Bacon. Farrah Mackenzie. Charlie Evans. Duration: 2 hours 18 minutes Platform: Netflix. You are reading this probably on your mobile or on your laptop browser. Everything is fine. Your network is good. Your Internet Plan is fantastic…
Read MoreCitadel Honey Bunny – Predictable
Genre – Spy + Action Time: 6 episodes x average 50 minutes each Platform: Amazon Prime Let’s start with some disclaimers. First: I haven’t seen the ‘other’ Citadel series due to which I miss/am unaware of the connection between ‘those’ and the constant references to Citadel ‘here’. The others – from some online…
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 MoreFoul Play (1978) – Surprisingly good comic thriller
All clickable links in red Writer, Director: Colin Higgins Genre: Comic thriller Time: 1 Hour 51 minutes Platform: You Tube Alfred Hitchcock made 58 films over 50 years of which 11 were superb spy films, though they were marketed as “suspense thrillers”. His films influenced and continue to influence generations of filmmakers, in…
Read MoreThe Sea Wolves – 1980 – A charming true story
All Clickable links in Red Genre – War Movie (true story) Language – English Time: 2 Hours Platform: YouTube (Free) Throughout history, many nation have depended on goods carried by merchant ships trade for their daily survival. It is more accurate for island nations like Britain and Japan. Britain was almost strangled by…
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 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…
Read MoreAnek (2022) – Bold topic ….
Director: Anubhav Sinha Script: Anubhav Sinha. Seema Agarwal. Yash Keswani. Cast: Ayushman Khurrana. Andrea Kevichusa. Manoj Pahwa. J.D.Chakravarthi. Genre: Spy – action -police Story. Platform: Netflix Duration: 2 Hours 25 minutes Films about the North East are conspicuous by their absence. People from the North East are usually viewed through stereotypes in…
Read MoreAll the Old Knives (1994) – Slow Burn but Riveting
Dir: Janus Metz Cast: Chris Pine. Thandiwe Newton. Jonathan Pryce. Laurence Fishburne Story and Script: Olen Steinhauer It is said that the end of the Cold War also ended spy fiction as a genre, be it in print or on film. The post-1991 “unipolar” world soon proved to be a fallacy. As…
Read MoreHeart of Stone (2023) – That sinking feeling
Consider this. A secret agent is on a mission and saves the world. He returns to his home town and agency and is given a new mission. And then he discovers that he has to save the world all over again as he did not do a proper job of it in the first…
Read MoreThe Night Manager – two equally good versions
The end of the Cold War in 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union supposedly gave a “peace dividend”. The enormous budgets of the Armed Forces on both sides of the US-USSR divide could now be used for “peaceful purposes”. Or so they thought. John le Carre’s The Night Manager was published…
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