TV Series
Mr. 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 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 MoreSeventeen Moments of Spring (1973) – Excellent
Story : Yulian (Julian) Semyonov Direction : Tatyana Lioznova Cast : Vyacheslav Tikhonov, Most of us are used to spy stories where Western Heroes set out to slay the evil Soviet Empire and save the Western Way of life. The Spy fiction genre has its rules in that the Western characters are usually the…
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…
Read MoreSmiley’s People (1982) – Riveting
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) was the first book of The Karla Trilogy. John le Carre’s follow-up to this story was The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), which involved extensive travel to Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, Thailand and Cambodia, where he witnessed and made notes about the final assault of the Khmer Rouge on…
Read MoreKleo (2022) – ROCKING GOOD!
It’s 1987, and the Cold War is in full swing. Kleo Straub, an unofficial “wet work” specialist – meaning assassin – is infiltrated through The Wall into West Berlin to assassinate a target. She reaches the nightclub and entices the target, but not before an off-duty West Berlin cop Sven Petzold (Dimitri Schaad), tries…
Read MoreWAR SAILOR (KRIGSEILEREN) (2022) – TV Series (3 Parts) – Absorbing
In his six-volume autobiography, Winston Churchill said that the one thing that caused him maximum anxiety THROUGHOUT THE WAR was The Battle of the Atlantic. This was the battle by merchant ships, escorted by the British (and, after 1942, American) Navy, to bring supplies to Britain, to continue the war. These supplies came from…
Read MoreFUBAR (2023) – TV Series (8 Parts) – For Fans Only
Cast : Arnold Schwarzenegger. Monica Barbaro. Milan Carter. Gabriel Luna A secret agent is in a foreign country doing some caper. His guide keeps talking to him through a tiny two-way radio. The hijinks continue, and the secret agent just about escapes with his life after a spectacular ‘action’ scene where the bad…
Read MoreDogs of Berlin (2018) – gritty, violent, seamy, Berlin Noir
Noir. A genre of American filmmaking that came into its own during WW2 and the mid to late 1940s and gradually faded in the 1950s. The French were the first to identify it and give it a different name – noir in French means black. Generally, it signifies a specific style of filmmaking with specific…
Read MoreNight Agent (2023) and The Recruit (2022) – two modern spy series
At times I get asked – very politely, of course – whether I have something against “new stuff”, as most of my blogs are about “old” movies or serials. I have nothing for or against new stuff except that, at times, they seem to recycle “old stuff”. I also have a “problem” with TV…
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