With Matt Damon returning for a fourth outing as Jason Bourne next month, as well as The Criterion Collection announcing the Blu-ray release of the classic Night Train to Munich on September 6, we’re taking the opportunity to count down what we consider to be The 10 Best Spy Movies of all-time!
Some of the spies on this list have the best training in the world, while others are total fish-out-of-water yet somehow find the resourcefulness and bravery it takes to be a master spook. You can’t keep a good secret agent down, and you can’t deny the timelessness of our ten selections which run the gamut from the 1940’s to the present.
And yes, we considered a lot of what may be your favorite spy flicks for this list, and to offer a healthy alternative we present you with a list of excellent also-rans: The 39 Steps, Notorious, The Manchurian Candidate, From Russia With Love, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Ipcress File, Our Man Flint, The Day of the Jackal, Enter the Dragon, The Eiger Sanction, Top Secret!, Spies Like Us, La Femme Nikita, The Hunt For Red October, Mission: Impossible, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Spy Game, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, xXx, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Casino Royale (2006), Salt, Haywire, Hanna, Kingsman: The Secret Service, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
The 10 Best Spy Movies
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#10: The Bourne Identity (2002)
Director Doug Liman modernized author Robert Ludlum's work of Cold War fiction for the big screen in fine fashion for this 2002 hit, which features Matt Damon as the amnesiac title hero.
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#10: The Bourne Identity (2002)
The film is perhaps best-known for its thrilling five-minute car chase through the streets of Paris, in a Mini Cooper no less.
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#10: The Bourne Identity (2002)
As Damon's Jason Bourne discovers the highly-trained killer that he is, he also opens up his human side through a relationship with a woman named Marie, played by Franka Potente.
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#10: The Bourne Identity (2002)
Overall, the movie kicked off a series of films (the fourth opens this summer) while setting a more gritty tone for future spy films, including the Daniel Craig 007 movies.
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#9: Night Train to Munich (1940)
Carol Reed's British movie, made at the height of WWII, takes place a few years earlier right at the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany.
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#9: Night Train to Munich (1940)
At the center of the action is a woman named Anna (Margaret Lockwood), whom the Nazis imprison in a concentration camp only to deliberately allow her to escape in order to track her scientist father.
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#9: Night Train to Munich (1940)
Along the way she teams up with a crafty secret agent, played with charm and wit by Rex Harrison, who winds up losing her and her father back to the Nazis.
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#9: Night Train to Munich (1940)
But that's not the end, and it builds to a terrific climax on a cablecar to neutral Switzerland.
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#8: True Lies (1994)
After two Terminator films, The Abyss and Aliens director James Cameron decided to take a break from huge sci-fi films to try his hand at comedy. Of course, it wound up being the most expensive film of all-time upon release.
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#8: True Lies (1994)
Based on a little-seen French farce titled La Totale!, True Lies revolves around a top secret counter-terrorism expert named Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whose bored wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) and rebellious daughter (Eliza Dushku) have no idea the derring-do he does for a living.
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#8: True Lies (1994)
When Tasker attempts to bring a little excitement into his wife's life, he inadvertently gets her embroiled in foiling a Jihadist group's plans to drop a nuke on the U.S.A.
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#8: True Lies (1994)
Despite its increasingly ludicrous action sequences (that wouldn't seem outlandish in the post-Fast & Furious era), this is the kind of movie that would never be made in the very sensitive political climate we exist in today. It just seems to hit a little too close to home... but it's still funny as hell.
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#7: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
John le Carré practically defined the 20th century espionage genre with books like The Tailor of Panama, The Constant Gardener and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, all of which became movies.
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#7: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Although previously adapted for the BBC with Sir Alec Guinness, natural chameleon Gary Oldman inhabits the role of cunning British Intelligence agent George Smiley.
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#7: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Smiley, along with his assistant Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), are tasked with smoking out a Soviet mole from within the organization, and Smiley's quiet nature masks a fierce intellect that will stop at nothing until the culprit is caught.
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#7: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson condenses the labyrinthine plot down to its bare essence, choosing to focus less on the central mystery and more on character motivation and an incredibly immersive 1970's atmosphere.
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#6: Black Book (2006)
After years as a successful Hollywood filmmaker, director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Basic Instinct) went back to his Dutch roots for this sexy World War II-era thriller.
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#6: Black Book (2006)
Before she was the mystical Melisandre on "Game of Thrones," Carice van Houten starred in Black Book as Rachel Stein, a Jewish singer who embeds herself within the Nazi government under the alias Ellis de Vries.
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#6: Black Book (2006)
During the waning days of the war in Europe, she plants microphones in SS officials' offices while also falling in love with a sympathetic high-ranking officer named Müntze (Sebastian Koch).
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#6: Black Book (2006)
The highest-grossing Dutch film of all-time, this movie tells a spellbinding tale of enormous moral grey area during the pitiful final days of the Nazi regime.
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#5: North by Northwest (1959)
When Ernest Lehman wrote the script for this film, he set out to make the most Hitchcockian- film of all-time, and Alfred Hitchcock happily obliged him.
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#5: North by Northwest (1959)
With several memorable set pieces, including the famous airplane in the fields chase and the climax at Mount Rushmore, the movie is brimming with intrigue and suspense.
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#5: North by Northwest (1959)
It follows a 1950s ad man played by Cary Grant who is thrust into a situation in which he is mistaken for a spy as a smokescreen to protect the real spy embedded within a criminal organization.
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#5: North by Northwest (1959)
For its time the movie is sharp, sexy and beautifully crafted by Hitchcock, working at the peak of his powers as an orchestrator of memorable cinema.
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#4: Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Sydney Pollack directed this riveting Cold War thriller about a bookworm CIA researcher (Robert Redford) whose entire office is assassinated during his lunch break.
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#4: Three Days of the Condor (1975)
He returns to find everyone dead, and from then on goes underground as he attempts to figure out who is responsible and why.
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#4: Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Along the way he teams up with a random woman played by Faye Dunaway, whom he initially holds prisoner before they ultimately become lovers. It also features Max Von Sydow as a deadly mercenary with no real ties to any ideology beyond money.
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#4: Three Days of the Condor (1975)
The film's paranoid atmosphere was a key influence on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which also featured Redford.
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#3: The Lives of Others (2006)
Ulrich Mühe (Funny Games) gives a mesmerizing performance as an East Berlin Stasi surveillance captain who becomes engrossed with the lives of the married couple he is spying on.
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#3: The Lives of Others (2006)
Believing playwright Georg (Sebastian Koch) to be a little too outwardly loyal, he begins a heavy surveillance, only to learn that the Minister of Culture is lusting after Georg's wife (Martina Gedeck).
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#3: The Lives of Others (2006)
Mühe's character attempts to protect the couple as best he can, until he is sent into menial work.
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#3: The Lives of Others (2006)
The film deservedly earned the Best Foreign Language Film of the Year award at the 2007 Academy Awards.
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#2: Goldfinger (1964)
Although many of our readers might be partial to Daniel Craig, this third film in the 007 series is considered by many aficionados to be the superspy's best outing.
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#2: Goldfinger (1964)
Sean Connery hits his stride as Bond, hunting down the title megalomaniac before he can rob Fort Knox with the help of Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman).
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#2: Goldfinger (1964)
The movie really helped solidify many of the series' tropes, including the colorful henchmen, the world-dominating bad guy and, of course, the car chases.
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#2: Goldfinger (1964)
It also features this immortal exchange:
-You expect me to talk?
-No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.
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#1: The Third Man (1949)
Although we already included Night Train to Munich on this list, we would be remiss to not include director Carold Reed's OTHER great work of post-war espionage The Third Man.
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#1: The Third Man (1949)
The story revolves around pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who comes to Allied-occupied Vienna at the behest of his friend Harry Lime, only to discover Lime is dead.
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#1: The Third Man (1949)
Of course, this being a thriller, halfway through the film we discover that Lime (Orson Welles) is not only NOT dead but is perpetrating a medical fraud that leaves hundreds of children injured or dead.
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#1: The Third Man (1949)
The essential conflict at the heart of the story is whether or not Holly will sell his friend out to the government or remain loyal, a conflict that reaches into the heart of the aftermath of WWII. A true masterpiece, it is justifiably famous for Welles' iconic "cookoo clock" speech, as well as Reed's stylized filming techniques.
