10 Best Spy Movies You Didn't Watch By Now
Even if it's just for a few hours, the greatest spy movies make you feel like you're a real-life secret agent. Most of us will never fly across the globe on a covert operation, leap out of an aircraft to avoid an enemy, or get caught up in a high-speed pursuit.
Author:Paolo ReynaReviewer:James PierceSep 24, 2021164K Shares2.4M Views
Even if it's just for a few hours, the greatest spy movies make you feel like you're a real-life secret agent. Most of us will never fly across the globe on a covert operation, leap out of an aircraft to avoid an enemy, or get caught up in a high-speed pursuit.
However, we may immerse ourselves in an exciting experience without ever leaving the sofa thanks to a streaming service. Unpredictability is something else that the best spy movies have in common. The stakes are enormous, the agents are well-trained, and you have no clue what their next move will be.
Whether you're watching Jason Bourne fleeing assassins, James Bond completing his newest mission, or the Spy Kids going on an adventure, you can count on being amused until the end credits roll.
Spione (1928)
While there are enough Fritz Lang films to cover at least half of this list, Spione, his last silent film, is the granddaddy of the spy thriller. After the commercial failure of Metropolis, the studio attempted to terminate its contract. Therefore, it was produced on a much lower budget (1927).
Lang himself wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea, describing it as "a little picture with a lot of action." While the close-range shooting techniques reveal financial constraints, the best set-piece here a third-act train accident defies the fact that it was filmed nearly a century ago.
The opening scene alone is a wonder of the narrative economy in montage, describing the theft of papers from the French embassy in Shanghai and the murder of the commerce minister.
With its tools of the trade (miniature cameras, vanishing ink) and relentless series of double-crosses and disguises, Spione set the genre pattern in stone, even though Rudolf Klein-villain, Rogge's Haghi, can't match his earlier performances for Lang as the evil Dr. Mabuse.
Spione or Spies 1928 | 1080p BluRay | Romance | Thriller
Contraband (1940)
Contraband is just the second collaboration between British filmmaker Michael Powell and Hungarian screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, and it follows the previous year's Orkney-set The Spy in Black, reuniting co-stars Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson.
Contraband casts Veidt as a Danish sailor whose ship is held up for cargo inspection off the Kent coast and is lighter on its feet and funnier than the last picture. He pursues Hobson's thief into the London darkness, where he discovers a Nazi espionage network when his shore pass is taken.
Powell's unique, quirky tastes filter Hitchcock and, in an expressionist dream scene for Veidt, Lang, and he would later reveal details of a cameo that didn't make the cut in his 1986 autobiography:
"There was a beautiful little cigarette lady... with wonderful liquid eyes and nice long legs, who had a little sequence with Conrad Veidt that ended up on the editing room floor. It was Deborah Kerr's first appearance on any screen, and it was a pity I didn't save the clipping. "
Contraband 1940 Full Film
I Spy (2002)
With Eddie Murphy's career on the upswing following Dolemite and Coming 2 America, and Owen Wilson's career exploding with Loki, now is the perfect moment to rewatch this action-comedy starring two likable protagonists who riff like crazy.
Betty Thomas' 2002 buddy spy comedy I Spy stars, Wilson and Murphy, as a covert spy and a famous boxer who are forced to team up and go undercover to prevent an infamous gunrunner from selling a stolen stealth bomber on the black market. Based on the 1960s television series of the same name, I Spy stars, Wilson and Murphy, as a covert spy and a famous boxer who are forced to team up and go undercover to prevent an infamous gunrunner from selling a stolen.
I Spy (2002) Official Trailer 1 - Eddie Murphy Movie
Our Man In Havana (1959)
Graham Greene had been lured into MI6 – where he worked under the infamous Soviet spy Kim Philby – by his sister, so he knew a thing or two about the espionage game. While he was critical of his espionage fiction, he did provide a helping hand in getting some of his most well-known adaptations to the big screen.
Our Man in Havana was his third collaboration with director Carol Reed, and it was filmed on location not long after the collapse of the Batista dictatorship (in stunning widescreen by Oswald Morris), and it's a lot lighter than their previous masterwork The Third Man (1949).
Greene's script focuses heavily on humor, with Alec Guinness playing a vacuum salesman and a newly hired agent who sells fanciful stories about hi-tech weapons to finance his increasingly luxurious lifestyle.
Guinness is hilarious as the fabricator in various states of inebriation, but it's Nol Coward and Ralph Richardson's supporting roles as the Caribbean network head and London controller, respectively, that best serve Greene's script's dry, comedic ironies.
Our Man in Havana (1959) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
John Frankenheimer's Cold War classic shows a group of US troops abducted in Korea and indoctrinated into acting as political assassins, serving as a precursor to the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s and a descendant of the 1950s canon of "the enemy is among us" sci-fi films.
"They found a method to descend into the unconscious mind, part light-induced, half drug," and this set-up plays out in Frank Sinatra's traumatized army major's recurrent nightmares.
The specifics of this Sino-Soviet plan are revealed early on, leaving Laurence Harvey's conditioned commander with just the finale to consider. It's an unusual narrative technique for a thriller, but the oddity is The Manchurian Candidate's ace card (or rather, its queen of diamonds).
Frankenheimer maintains an unnerving and eerie feeling of dread, punctuating the uneasiness with unexpected outbreaks of violence, from his off-kilter framing to the focus changes and appropriately mesmerizing performances. As the suffering candidates, Sinatra and Harvey are excellent, but it is Angela Lansbury who delivers one of cinema's great monsters.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) - I Wanted a Killer Scene (11/12) | Movieclips
The Conversation (1974)
In The Conversation, Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a despondent saxophonist in a trashed apartment.
The Conversation is a paranoia-inducing murder thriller starring Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a surveillance specialist who really conducts eavesdropping! whose professional ethics and personal morality collide when he thinks he has eavesdropped on a couple who he believes is about to be killed.
Harry is drawn into a scheme involving hidden conspirators and unsavory violence, and he must remain alive while searching for the truth behind what he has seen. With each passing scene, Coppola develops a sense of anxiety, and David Shire's piano music sets the atmosphere.
The Conversation - Trailer - HQ
Dishonored (1931)
Two of Hollywood's greatest female stars went incognito on the silver screen in 1931. Marlene Dietrich's loose take on the same character, the third of her seven collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg, delivered the masterpiece. Greta Garbo may have won the box office crown for her title role in the forgettable Mata Hari, but it was her loose take on the same character, the third of her seven collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg, that delivered the masterpiece.
Dietrich starred as X-27, a piano-playing prostitute (real name: Marie Kolverer) entrusted by the Austrian secret service with collecting secrets from Victor McLaglen's Russian colonel in the film Dishonored.
It's the most complex and multifaceted of von Sternberg's roles for his star, lover, and muse: a parade of guises and disguises that both demonstrate the actor's remarkable range while also making the true character buried beneath an endless procession of self-preserving performances invisible – or at least indistinguishable.
"I've had a dreadful existence. She exclaims, "It may become my good fortune to have a beautiful death," and the true Marie appears in a barely noticeable gestural flash to claim an elusive dignity in sacrifice.
Dishonored 1931 Marlene Dietrich
Hanna (2011)
Hanna, directed by Joe Wright, stars Saoirse Ronan as a 15-year-old girl who has been groomed from infancy to be an assassin by her surrogate, ex-CIA asset father Erik (Eric Bana).
When Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), the CIA handler in charge of finding Hanna and her father, discovers the two, she is forced to confront startling truths about her past and existence as she tries to remain one step ahead of her pursuers.
Hanna is a sleek and nasty espionage thriller that strikes the point, with a banging soundtrack created by The Chemical Brothers.
Hanna (2011) Movie Trailer HD
North By Northwest (1959)
Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock returned to the espionage genre on many occasions, and any of his films from The 39 Steps (1935) to Notorious (1946) to Torn Curtain (1966) might have made this list. Is the 1959 film North by Northwest the finest of the bunch?
Its cross-country story of mistaken identification, connecting set-piece to barnstorming set-piece from Manhattan to Mount Rushmore, makes a strong argument for it being his most virtuoso.
Cary Grant's Madison Avenue ad-man is abducted by James Mason's espionage ring after making a phone call for a certain George Kaplan, putting the wrong-man tale in motion.
Hitchcock does his best Hitchcock impersonation, rearranging scenes from his previous films into one greatest hits package while negotiating the twists and turns of Ernest Lehman's script.
He may have forsaken the dark psychodrama of last year's Vertigo in favor of more lighthearted thrills, but there's nothing frivolous about seeing a maestro and his essential collaborators perform the songs like this.
North by Northwest (1959) Official Trailer - Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint Movie HD
The Bourne Identity (2002)
Speaking of slick, deliver-what-you-promise films, Doug Liman's 2002 adaptation of Robert Ludlum's 1980 spy novel Jason Bourne is still a heart-pounding action thriller with an iconic performance from Matt Damon as the amnesiac assassin-turned-fugitive Jason Bourne, as well as some of the most engrossing action choreography and cinematography you'll ever see.
Jason Bourne finds himself in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with his old handlers, who think he is a loose end who has to be tied up, after being picked up in a fishing boat riddled with gunshots and with no idea who he is.
The Bourne Identity is the first installment in the highly acclaimed Bourne trilogy, and it is a modern espionage thriller masterpiece.
The Bourne Identity Official Trailer #1 - Brian Cox Movie (2002) HD
Paolo Reyna
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James Pierce
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