To start with, Our Kind of Traitor is based on perhaps the least-interesting of John le Carré’s novels that have so far been turned into a movie or TV miniseries or both, so it’s perfectly natural that it should be the least-interesting movie of the recent le Carré fad (which I’m only really using to […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: The November Man is the latest in a long line of spy thrillers that owe their exist and most […]

For reasons owing mostly to a capricious, unfair universe, A Most Wanted Man will probably always be first remembered as the movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last starring role. That’s a cruel fate for any film to have to live up to, but at least in this case it’s helped out by Hoffman being absurdly […]

There might not be any 20th Century novelist as well-served by dramatic adaptations of his works as British spy author (and former British spy) John le Carré: the not-as-great films taken from his body of work feature such wholly enjoyable thinking-heavy thrillers as The Russia House and The Tailor of Panama, while the great ones […]

The Constant Gardener is the kind of brainy thriller that one expects from an adaption of John Le Carré, noted British spy novelist and ennui expert. This might just be the best of all the Le Carré films I’ve seen: like all of them it evinces a frustration at the Proper British Way, but here […]