The Day of the Jackal (2024) Review
Eddie Redmayne plays a charming assassin and Lashana Lynch the MI6 officer hunting him in this ten-episode reimagining of Forsyth's novel. A great first episode and good action, a saggy middle. It's a 7.
Tag: Espionage
Spy fiction runs on withheld information, which makes it a structural exercise as much as a genre. This tag collects reviews of espionage films and fiction and the craft of managing what a reader knows.
Cold WarIan Fleming Day: Two Thousand Words a Morning
Ian Fleming failed as a soldier, a banker and a stockbroker, found his footing in naval intelligence, and wrote Casino Royale at forty-three in about five weeks. Every Bond novel after it came from the same quota: 2,000 words a…
EspionageThe Greatest James Bond Films
Every James Bond film ranked, with the rating each one carries in its own review. Casino Royale first, Die Another Day last, and a series that survives by periodically admitting it has gone wrong.
2010sKilling Eve – “Nice Face” (S1E1, 2018) Review
Killing Eve's pilot rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Phoebe Waller-Bridge adapted a set of novellas into an hour that is genuinely funny about an assassin and genuinely serious about a bored woman who has been waiting…
2020sThe Gray Man (2022) Review
The Gray Man (2022) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Netflix spent around two hundred million dollars on an action film with two of the largest stars available, and produced something nobody can describe afterward. The Prague…
2020sTenet (2020) Review
Tenet (2020) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Nolan bought a real 747 to crash because it cost less than building a model, and then mixed the film so that a substantial number of people could not…
2020sThe Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) Review
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two superb scenes about who gets to carry a national symbol, connected by four episodes of pursuit. Carl Lumbly appears twice and gives the…
2000sThe Bourne Identity (2002) Review
The Bourne Identity (2002) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Doug Liman fought the studio through a chaotic shoot, put a fight scene in a Paris apartment with a ballpoint pen, and reset what an action film…
1970sThree Days of the Condor (1975) Review
Three Days of the Condor (1975) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man who reads books for the CIA goes out for lunch and comes back to find everybody he works with shot. The film changed…
2000sMunich (2005) Review
Munich (2005) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Spielberg's coldest film and the one that cost him most. A revenge picture in which every success makes the situation worse, and the argument is in the arithmetic.
Book ReviewsGhost Wars
Steve Coll's Ghost Wars traces twenty-two years of CIA operations in Afghanistan that led directly to 9/11, and his choice to end the book on September 10th makes the argument impossible to ignore. Everything that happened the next morning had…
Book ReviewsThe Hunt for Red October
The cat-and-mouse pursuit of a defecting Soviet submarine captain and his revolutionary stealth sub, with CIA analyst Jack Ryan racing to grasp his intentions. The blockbuster debut that invented the modern techno-thriller: gripping, meticulously researched, and genre-defining, if heavy on…