89 Best Spy Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer
(Photo by 20th Century Fox/ Courtesy Everett Collection. SPY.)
Spies! Secret agents! Intelligence officers! Undercover operatives! Moles! (Moley moley moley moley!) Some of our favorite characters in some of our favorite movies are adept at sneaking into where they don’t belong and either taking out enemies or gathering crucial information.
To celebrate the release of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the conclusion to the decades-in-the-making story arc that began with Mission: Impossible, we present our top Best Spy Movies, ranked by Tomatometer.
What counts as a spy movie, first of all? Our definition is that the movie has to have spy characters and a political, international, and/or high-government dressing. That’s a pretty broad definition, but it allows us to include a lot of great films. The list is also Certified Fresh movies alone.
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(Photo by Sony / Courtesy Everett Collection. CASINO ROYALE.)
You may notice that there are several spy movies conspicuous by their absence in this list. To explain why, a quick history of spy movies during the Cold War is necessary. Buckle up:
During the 1960s and ’70s, there was a constant fear throughout the Western world due to the Cold War. Nuclear attack could happen at any time and students practiced “duck and cover.” Paranoia about communism was rampant. Love of country was paramount, and anyone who dissented was automatically suspect. Spies could be everywhere!
This fear was channeled by filmmakers into some of the best spy movies ever made. They’re not listed here because they don’t meet our minimum review threshold for Certified Fresh: review websites, newspapers and blogs aren’t inclined to review old spy movies when there are new films to be concerned about. Still, it’s important to point out that movies like the British films The Ipcress File and The Quiller Memorandum, British / French film The Day of the Jackal and the later American movie The Falcon and the Snowman are excellent and well worth tracking down.
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(Photo by Universal/ Courtesy Everett Collection. THE BOURNE IDENTITY.)
Spy films got a renaissance of sorts in the 1990s and 2000s, after the Berlin Wall fell. Technology developed to the point where high-tech spying was possible through computers and through phone lines. Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman, was a spiritual sequel of sorts to The Conversation from 1974. Another great spy film, Ronin, starred Robert De Niro in a series of spectacular car chases to retrieve a briefcase Macguffin. The ’90s was also the decade of wicked satire, so spoofs of spy films were everywhere, kicking off with the Austin Powers series, which mainly satirized British spy films that Mike Myers enjoyed in his youth, like Our Man Flint.
The 2000s brought an updated take on the 1980s Bourne novel spy series, with Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, a man with no memory, mysterious fighting and gun skills, and ties to a strange paramilitary organization.
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In fact, the only spy movie to win Best Picture was Argo in 2012, and no director has won Best Director for a spy movie. Argo, a dramatization of a true story features Ben Affleck (who also directed and produced) as a CIA officer who devises an elaborate plan to get six hostages out of Iran by creating an entire fake sci-fi movie from scratch, including concept art by Jack Kirby! The true story of what happened during what’s now called the Canadian Caper was classified until just recently, which allowed Affleck to make this movie.
Among other Academy Awards involving spy films, Mark Rylance won Best Supporting Actor as Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies, and Gary Oldman won Best Actor as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Among women, Ingrid Bergman won Best Actress as Alicia Huberman in Hitchcock’s Notorious, so at least Hitchcock’s movies were still awarded at the time in some way.
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(Photo by Universal/ Courtesy Everett Collection. BLACK BAG.)
Though not showered with golden statues, spy movies tend to do very well at the box office, as filmgoers love to return time and again to movie theaters to see characters wear disguises, avoid capture, and find their targets under cover of darkness.
The biggest live-action spy movie of all time going by worldwide gross, and the only one to pass $300 million at the box office, is Skyfall, the third of five Daniel Craig James Bond movies and the one with the Home Alone-like estate-invasion theme. Skyfall is surpassed by Despicable Me 2, a family-oriented animated sequel with equal parts espionage and supervillain themes.
Others that have crested the $200 million mark are The Bourne Ultimatum, the second of the Bourne series and the highest rated; Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the sixth entry in the series and the second pairing writer-director Christopher McQuarrie with Tom Cruise; Mission: Impossible II, the strange second entry by director John Woo and the top-grossing movie of 2000; Austin Powers in Goldmember, the third and arguably best of this satirical series; Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the sequel to Fallout; Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, the highly anticipated followup to the surprise home video hit; and Spectre, the Bond movie after Skyfall that brought back the classic evil spy organization of the same name and its leader, Blofeld. (Steve Horton)
