Spy movies: Best Spy movies

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Following his pursuit by Kirill (in The Bourne Supremacy), Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) evades Moscow police while wounded and deals with more flashbacks of when he first joined Operation Treadstone. Six weeks…

The Bourne Identity

In the Mediterranean Sea, Italian fishermen rescue an unconscious American (Matt Damon) floating adrift with two gunshot wounds in his back. They tend to his wounds, and when the man wakes, they find he suffers from dissociative amnesia.…

The Day of the Jackal

On 22 August 1962, an assassination attempt is made on the President, General Charles de Gaulle, by the militant French underground organisation OAS in anger over the French government granting independence to Algeria. As the…

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In October 1973, “Control“, head of British intelligence (referred to as “The Circus”), sends agent Jim Prideaux to Budapest to meet a Hungarian general wishing to defect. Prideaux is shot.…

The Bourne Supremacy

Two years after their disappearance, Jason Bourne and Marie Kreutz are in Goa, India. Still experiencing flashbacks about his life as a CIA assassin, he records them in a notebook. In Berlin, a CIA agent working…

Three Days of the Condor

Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is a bookish CIA analyst, code named “Condor”. He works at the American Literary Historical Society in New York City, which is actually a clandestine CIA office. The seven staff members read books,…

Skyfall

In Istanbul, MI6 agents James Bond and Eve Moneypenny pursue mercenary Patrice, who has stolen a hard drive containing details of undercover agents. As Bond and Patrice fight atop a moving train, M orders…

GoldenEye

In 1986, at Arkhangelsk, MI6 agents James Bond and Alec Trevelyan infiltrate a Soviet chemical weapons facility and plant explosives. Trevelyan is captured and executed by Colonel Arkady Grigorovich…

The Manchurian Candidate

Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) is a war veteran who commanded a famous U.S. Army raid during the Persian Gulf War. For his role in that mission, Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) was awarded the Medal of Honor for…

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

IMF agent Trevor Hanaway is killed in Budapest by assassin Sabine Moreau, who takes the file containing Russian nuclear launch codes he had stolen so she can give them to a man known only as “Cobalt”. Meanwhile, IMF…

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Spy Game

In 1991, the governments of the U.S. and China are on the verge of a major trade agreement, with the President due to visit China to seal the deal. The CIAlearns that its asset Tom Bishop has been arrested at a People’s Liberation…

Patriot Games

Retired CIA analyst Jack Ryan is on vacation with his family in London. They witness a terrorist attack on Lord William Holmes, Minister of State for Northern Ireland. Ryan intervenes and is injured, but he kills one of the…

Thunderball

James Bond attends the funeral of Colonel Jacques Bouvar, a SPECTRE operative connected with the previous murders of two MI6 agents.[8] Bouvar is alive and disguised as his own widow, but Bond identifies him. Pursuing Bouvar to his…

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

In Portugal, James Bond – agent 007, sometimes referred to simply as ‘007’ – saves a woman on the beach from committing suicide by drowning, and later meets her again in a casino. The woman, Contessa Teresa…

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

After intercepting nerve gas being sold to Chechen terrorists in Minsk, IMF agent Ethan Hunt is determined to prove the existence of the Syndicate, a criminal consortium the CIA does not believe…

Notorious

The film opens at a party in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997. Just as The Notorious B.I.G. is about to be killed in a shooting, the film flashes back to Biggie’s childhood in Brooklyn, New York, where he lived during his…

Clear and Present Danger

The discovery of the murder of an American businessman, Peter Hardin, and his family, outrage U.S. President Bennett, Hardin’s personal friend. When Hardin is found to have been connected to a Colombian drug cartel, from which he skimmed…

Live and Let Die

Three MI6 agents are killed under mysterious circumstances within 24 hours in the United Nations headquarters in New York City, New Orleans and the Caribbean nation of San Monique, while monitoring the operations of the island’s dictator,…

Where Eagles Dare

In the winter of 1943–44, U.S. Army Brigadier General George Carnaby (Robert Beatty), a chief planner for the Western Front, is captured by the Germans. He is taken for interrogation to the Schloß Adler, a…

The Ipcress File

A scientist called Radcliffe is kidnapped from a train and his security escort killed. Harry Palmer, a British Army sergeant with a criminal past, now working for a Ministry of Defence organisation, is summoned by his…

For Your Eyes Only

In the prologue Bond is Seen visitng the grave of his late wife Tracy Bond; Bond is trapped in a remote controlled helicopter by a bald wheelchaired villain who has a white cat; Bond takes control of the helicopter; scoops up the villain [minus…

Charade

While on a skiing holiday, simultaneous translator Regina “Reggie” Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) tells her friend Sylvie (Dominique Minot) that she has decided to divorce her husband Charles. She also meets a charming American…

Argo

On November 4, 1979, Iranian activists storm the United States embassy in Tehran in retaliation for President Jimmy Carter giving the Shah asylum in the U.S. during the Iranian Revolution. 60 of the embassy staff…

The Conversation

Harry Caul is a surveillance expert who runs his own company in San Francisco. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door and burglar alarm, he uses pay phones to make calls,…

The Spy Who Loved Me

British and Soviet ballistic-missile submarines are mysteriously disappearing. James Bond — MI6 agent 007 — is summoned to investigate. On the way to his briefing, Bond escapes an ambush by a squad of Soviet agents…

Syriana

U.S. energy giant Connex Oil is losing control of key oil fields in a Persian Gulf kingdom ruled by the al-Subaai family. The emirate‘s foreign minister, Prince Nasir, has granted natural gas drilling rights to…

Dr. No

John Strangways, the British MI6 Station Chief in Jamaica, and his secretary are ambushed and killed. The assassins steal documents related to “Crab Key” and “Doctor No”. In response, M, the head of MI6,…

The Living Daylights

James Bond is assigned to aid the defection of a KGB officer, General Georgi Koskov, covering his escape from a concert hall in Bratislava, Czechoslovakiaduring intermission. During the mission, Bond notices that the KGB…

The Lady Vanishes

English tourist Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) arrives at the “Gasthof Petrus” inn in the country of Bandrika, “one of Europe’s few undiscovered corners”. Iris is returning to Britain to marry a “blue-blooded…

The Man with the Golden Gun

In London, a golden bullet with James Bond’s code “007” etched into its surface is received by MI6. It is believed that it was sent by the famed assassin Francisco Scaramanga, who uses a golden gun to intimidate the…

The Good Shepherd

A photograph and an audio recording on reel-to-reel tape are dropped off anonymously at the home of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a senior CIA officer, after the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba fails due to an undisclosed leak.…

You Only Live Twice

American NASA spacecraft Jupiter 16 is hijacked from orbit by an unidentified spaceship. The United States suspect it to be the work of the Soviets, but the British suspect Japanese involvement since the spacecraft landed in…

Spectre

A posthumous message from the previous M leads MI6 agent James Bond to carry out an unauthorised mission in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, where he stops a terrorist bombing plot. Bond kills Marco Sciarra, the…

Saboteur

Aircraft factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) is accused of starting a fire at the Stewart Aircraft Works in Glendale, California, an act of sabotage that killed his friend Mason (Virgil Summers). Kane believes the real culprit is a man…

Body of Lies

Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a CIA case officer in Iraq, tracking a terrorist called Al-Saleem (Alon Abutbul). He meets Nizar, a member of the terrorist organization who is prepared to offer information in return…

The Fourth Protocol

In 1968, an East–West agreement is established to halt nuclear proliferation. One of its clauses, the Fourth Protocol, forbids the non-conventional delivery of a nuclear weapon to a target. MI5 officer John Preston breaks…

Licence to Kill

DEA agents collect MI6 agent James Bond and his friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, on their way to Leiter’s wedding in Key West, to have them assist in capturing drugs lord Franz Sanchez.…

Quantum of Solace

James Bond is driving from Lake Garda to Siena, Italy, with the captured Mr. White (Jesper Christensen) in the boot of his car. After evading pursuers, Bond delivers White to M, who interrogates him…

Funeral in Berlin

British secret agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is sent to Berlin by his superior Colonel Ross to arrange the defection of Colonel Stok (Oskar Homolka), a prominent Soviet intelligence officer. Palmer is sceptical but…

The Lives of Others

In 1984 East Germany, Stasi Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), code name HGW XX/7, is ordered to spy on the playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), who has escaped state scrutiny due to his pro-Communist views and…

The Odessa File

On 22 November 1963, the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Peter Miller, a young freelance reporter in Hamburg, West Germany, pulls over to the curb to listen to a radio report of the event. As a result, he…

The World Is Not Enough

MI6 agent James Bond arrives at a Swiss bank in Bilbao, Spain to retrieve money for Sir Robert King, a British oil tycoon and friend of M. Bond tells the banker that King was buying a report stolen from…

Octopussy

While trying to escape from East to West Berlin, British agent 009 is fatally wounded and dies after reaching the residence of the British Ambassador, dressed as a circus clown and carrying a fake Fabergé…

Salt

Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is being tortured in a prison in North Korea on suspicion of being an American spy. Her boyfriend, arachnologist Mike Krause (August Diehl), generates so much publicity about Salt’s imprisonment…

Tomorrow Never Dies

MI6 sends James Bond, agent 007, into the field to spy on a terrorist arms bazaar on the Russian border. Despite M‘s insistence on letting 007 finish his reconnaissance, British Admiral Roebuck orders the frigate…

Zero Dark Thirty

Maya is a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst tasked with finding the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In 2003 she is stationed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. She and officer Dan attend the black…

Red

Frank Moses (Willis), retired black-ops CIA agent, lives alone in Cleveland, Ohio. Lonely, Frank creates opportunities to talk to Sarah Ross (Parker), a worker at the General Services…

Diamonds Are Forever

James Bond—Agent 007—pursues Ernst Stavro Blofeld hunting down SPECTRE operatives across the world. He eventually finds him at a facility where Blofeld look-alikes are being created through plastic surgery. Bond kills a…

The 39 Steps

Coming to the assistance of a nanny who is almost killed during a bungled hit-and-run assassination attempt, Richard Hannay (More) is surprised to find that there is no baby in her pram. Curious, he meets her at the Palace Music…

Charlie Wilson’s War

In 1980, Congressman Charlie Wilson is more interested in partying than legislating, frequently throwing huge galas and staffing his congressional office with young, attractive women. His social life eventually brings about a federal…

A View to a Kill

MI6 agent James Bond is sent to Siberia to locate the body of 003 and recover a microchip originating from the Soviet Union. Upon his return, Q analyses the microchip and establishes that it is a copy of one…

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

In 1963, at the height of the Cold War, professional thief-turned CIA agent Napoleon Solo extracts Gaby Teller, daughter of Dr. Udo Teller, an alleged Naziscientist-turned United States collaborator at the end of World…

Enter the Dragon

Lee, a highly proficient Shaolin martial artist and instructor from Hong Kong, is approached by Braithwaite, a British intelligence agent investigating the suspected crime lord Han. Lee is persuaded to attend a high-profile martial arts competition…

The November Man

In 2008, CIA agent Peter Devereaux supervises a young operative, David Mason, during a protective mission in Montenegro. Mason disobeys Devereaux’s orders not to fire. He shoots and kills an assassin but also kills a child. Five…

Nikita

Nikita (Anne Parillaud) is a nihilistic teenage junkie who commits her life to anarchy, drugs and violence. One night, she participates in the robbery of a pharmacyowned by a friend’s parents. The robbery goes awry, erupting…

The Recruit

When James Clayton was young, his father was killed in 1990 in a Peruvian plane crash for unknown reasons. In college, Clayton has computer interests and analytical skills that, when he goes job hunting, are sought by industry and government. A…

The Third Man

Opportunistic racketeering thrives in a damaged and impoverished Allied-occupied Vienna, which is divided into four sectors, each controlled by one of the occupying forces: American, British, French, and Soviet. These powers…

Die Another Day

MI6 agent James Bond infiltrates a North Korean military base, where Colonel Tan-Sun Moon is illegally trading weapons for African conflict diamonds. After Moon’s assistant Zao discovers that Bond is a British agent via an…

Unknown

Dr. Martin Harris and his wife Liz arrive in Berlin for a biotechnology summit. At their hotel, as Liz goes to check in, Harris realizes he left his briefcase at the airport and takes a taxi to retrieve it (without telling Liz).…

Scorpio

Cross (Burt Lancaster) is an experienced but retiring Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent and assassin who is training free-lance hit-man Jean Laurier (Alain Delon) (alias “Scorpio”) to replace him. Cross is teaching him as…

The Falcon and the Snowman

Boyce, an expert in the sport of falconry and son of an FBI office employee, gets a job at a civilian defense contractor working in the so-called “Black Vault,” a secure communication facility through which flows information on…

The Eiger Sanction

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock is an art professor and mountaineer. He is also a collector of paintings, most of them obtained from the black market. To finance his collection he works as a so-called “counter-assassin” for a secret US…

The Sum of All Fears

During the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) prepares to conduct a tactical nuclear strike to stave off defeat. The necessity for the strike is averted, but an Israeli copy of a Mark 12 nuclear…

Eye of the Needle

A man calling himself Henry Faber is actually a German Nazi spy nicknamed “the Needle” because of his preferred method of assassination, the stiletto. He is cold and calculating, emotionlessly focused on the task at…

A Most Wanted Man

A young Turkish boxing champion in Hamburg notices he is being shadowed by a tall gaunt young man in a black coat, who turns up on his doorstep and demands hospitality. Somewhat suspiciously, they allow Issa to stay in the attic as he…

Black Book

In 1944, Dutch-Jewish singer Rachel Stein is hiding from the Nazi regime in the occupied Netherlands. When the farmhouse where she had been hiding is accidentally destroyed in an Allied bombing, she goes to see a lawyer named Smaal,…

Killer Elite

In 1980, mercenaries Danny Bryce (Jason Statham), Hunter (Robert De Niro), Davies (Dominic Purcell), and Meier (Aden Young) are in Mexico to assassinate a man. Danny is shot when he becomes distracted after realizing he has…

The International

Louis Salinger, an Interpol detective, and Eleanor Whitman, an Assistant District Attorney from Manhattan, are investigating the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC), which funds activities such as money…

The Quiller Memorandum

British secret agent Kendall Jones is shot dead on a deserted Berlin street. At a private men’s club in London, the directors of the unnamed agency, Gibbs and Rushington, decide to send American agent Quiller to continue the assignment,…

Our Man Flint

Spy extraordinaire Derek Flint (James Coburn) is an ex-agent of Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage) who is brought out of retirement to deal with the threat of Galaxy, a worldwide…

The Russia House

Bartholomew “Barley” Scott-Blair (Sean Connery), the head of a British publishing firm, is on a business trip to Moscow. He attends a writers’ retreat near Peredelkino where he speaks of an end to tensions with the…

Safe House

In Cape Town, South Africa, ex-CIA NOC operative turned international criminal Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) acquires a data storage device from rogue MI6agent Alec Wade (Liam Cunningham). After, the pair is attacked by a…

Hanna

Hanna Heller is a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her father, Erik, in rural northern Finland. Since the age of two, Hanna has been trained by Erik, an ex-CIAoperative from Germany, to be a skilled assassin. He teaches…

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

The film opens with construction executive John (Brad Pitt) and tech support consultant Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie) answering questions during marriage counselling. The couple has been married for “five or six” years, but their marriage…

Traitor

Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) is an Arabic-speaking Sudanese-American and devout Muslim. His Sudanese father was killed by a car bomb when he was a child. As an adult, Samir is first seen operating as an arms dealer. While negotiating a…

The Quiet American

The story is set in 1952 in Saigon, Vietnam (French Indochina at that time), toward the end of the First Indochina War (1946-1954) in which French forces fought the Communist-led Viet Minh rebels. On one…

Operation Crossbow

From 1943, Nazi Germany started working on terror weapons, the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket while British Intelligence learns about a new secret weapon. Technical problems with the V-1 lead the Germans to create a manned…

Knight and Day

After colliding with Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) twice in the airport departure terminal on the way home from Wichita to pick up car parts, June Havens (Cameron Diaz) is told she has been bumped to a later flight. CIA Agent…

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

In 1967, British spy Austin Powers thwarts an assassination attempt by his nemesis Dr. Evil in a London nightclub. Dr. Evil escapes in a space rocket and cryogenically freezes himself. Powers volunteers to be…

Red 2

Three years after the previous film, while trying to lead a normal life with girlfriend Sarah Ross, Frank Moses is approached by Marvin Boggs, who claims people are still after them, but Frank dismisses him. After appealing a second time, Marvin…

Get Smart

Get Smart is an American comedy television series that satirizes the secret agent genre that was popular in the United States in the late 1960s. The program was created by Mel Brooks and Buck…

Haywire

Former Marine Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) goes to a diner in Upstate New York to meet Aaron (Channing Tatum). He tells her to get in his car, but she refuses and they fight. He pulls out a gun, but she disarms and pistol-whips him. Scott…

The Black Windmill

Two schoolboys are playing with a model plane on an abandoned military base in the English countryside. They are approached by two RAF personnel who rebuke them for trespassing, and take them to see their…

Telefon

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union planted a number of long-term, deep-cover sleeper agents all over the United States, spies so thoroughly brainwashed that even they did not know they were agents and…

The Mackintosh Man

Joseph Rearden, a British Intelligence agent, arrives in London and makes a rendezvous with Mackintosh, the head of his organisation, in a discreet office located just off Trafalgar Square. Mackintosh and his deputy, Mrs Smith, inform…

Green Zone

On March 19, 2003, Iraqi General Mohammed Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor) flees his residence amid the bombardment of Baghdad. Before leaving the compound, he passes a notebook to his aide Seyyed, instructing him to warn his officers to get to their…

Billion Dollar Brain

Harry Palmer (Michael Caine), who has left MI5 to work as a private investigator, is told by a mechanical voice on the phone to take a package to Helsinki. The package contains six virus-laden eggs that have been stolen from…

Triple Cross

Early in the Second World War, debonair safecracker Eddie Chapman (Christopher Plummer) blows open a wall safe. Outside, a car is backfiring repeatedly and a marching band is passing, which mask the blast. Chapman casually removes some jewels from…

Carve Her Name with Pride

Violette Bushell is a young woman whose father is English and mother is French, living in London early in the Second World War. She meets French Army officer Etienne Szabo, stationed in the city, and they…

From Paris with Love

A personal aide to the U.S. ambassador in France, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) has an enviable life in Paris and a beautiful French girlfriend, but his real passion is his side job as a low-level operative for the CIA. Reese wants to…

Spy Kids

Gregorio and Ingrid Cortez are rival spies who fall in love. They retire and have two children, 12-year-old Carmen and 9-year-old Juni. They work for the Organization of Super Spies (OSS) doing desk work. The children have no idea of their…

Fair Game

Valerie Plame is employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, a fact known outside the agency to no one except her husband and parents. She is an intelligence officer involved in a number of sensitive and sometimes dangerous covert operations…

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

In 1999, spy Austin Powers enjoys his honeymoon with his wife, Vanessa Kensington. She turns out to be a fembot controlled by Austin’s nemesis Dr. Evil. She attempts to kill Austin, then self-destructs.…

Pickup on South Street

On a crowded New York City subway train, pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) steals Candy’s (Jean Peters) wallet. Unbeknownst to Skip or Candy, in the wallet is microfilm of top-secret government information. Candy was delivering an…

Bourne Franchise

The Bourne films are a series of action thriller movies based on the character Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin suffering from extreme memory loss who must figure out who he is,[1] created by…

5 Fingers

In neutral Turkey in 1944, German ambassador Franz von Papen and his British counterpart Sir Frederic Taylor attend a reception. Von Papen encounters Countess Anna Staviska, who is a Frenchwoman and the widow of a pro-German Polish count.…

The Riddle of the Sands

In the Spring of 1901, Carruthers, an aristocratic junior official in the British Foreign Office, is invited on a yachting and duck-shooting holiday by an old University acquaintance called Arthur Davies. On Carruthers’ arrival…

The Little Drummer Girl

Set in Europe and the Middle East, the plot follows the Mossad‘s clandestine attempt to flush out a PLO bomber named Khalil. To neutralize Khalil, they first kidnap (and later kill) his brother who is on a lecture tour, speaking…

Austin Powers: Goldmember

Dr. Evil plans to travel back in time to 1975 and bring back Johan van der Smut, aka “Goldmember”, who developed a cold fusion unit for a tractor beam which Dr. Evil names “Preparation H“. He…