Allied movie review: movie spies with delicious old-fashioned mystique
An elegant potboiler that judiciously balances psychological and physical suspense, one that feels like a romantic drama from WWII only recently rediscovered.
spy
Keeping Up with the Joneses movie review: no, let them go
Take True Lies and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Remove wit, sexy charm, and satire on marriage. This is a recipe for a movie anyone wants to see?
Swallows and Amazons movie review: a free-range kiddie adventure
Behold a time before helicopter parenting, when children roamed free, ate cake for dinner, and played with fire. A delightfully old-fashioned treat.
Our Kind of Traitor movie review: ordinary everyday spies
Smartly elegant; the fantastic cast makes it worth your time. But it does feel as if it belongs on the small screen spread across six or eight hours.
Grimsby (aka The Brothers Grimsby) movie review: grim indeed
A soul-crushing experience: lazy, cheap, lurid, and stupid. Painfully unfunny and pointless. Sacha Baron Cohen now panders to those he once rightly mocked.
Zoolander 2 movie review: fashionably foolish
A tad dated and scattershot, but the messy package is inventively absurd… and unlike many Hollywood comedies, able to carry that absurdity to a silly end.
Spooks: The Greater Good (aka MI-5) movie review: game of moles
A ridiculous, rote action thriller, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining, crammed with all sorts of macho emoting and spy nonsense as it is.
Bridge of Spies movie review: the lawyer who went out in the Cold War
Presents American hypocrisy in defense of America with the snorting derision it warrants, while also being a gripping and intense Cold War thriller.
Spectre movie review: Bond goes backward
After a truly spectacular and fresh opening sequence, everyone might as well be enacting a Bond puppet show, which is sometimes unpleasantly retro-icky.
Barely Lethal movie review: hidden in plain sight
Charming and funny, a wonderfully sweet and silly mashup of spy stuff and high-school comedies, like if John Hughes made a James Bond movie.
