For this list of the best spy movies ever made, Vulture opted for a big-tent approach in an attempt to create a selection that captured the full breadth of the spy film. Directed by Ivan Dixon (best known as Sergeant Kinchloe on Hogan’s Heroes), the film casts no judgment on Freeman’s militancy, and its depiction of entrenched racism provides many suggestions that Freeman might have the right idea, leading to a suggestively open-ended finale. Sometimes nudism is also extremely conservative and sometimes people who go to the restaurant with their clothes on are viewed crookedly.

If either could let their guards down, le Carré’s Smiley could doubtlessly have long, meaningful conversations about the personal costs of spying with Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), the protagonist of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.A surveillance expert with a particular gift for audio work, Caul takes on the challenging job of recording a couple in an open space.

Brian De Palma kicked off this long-running, Tom Cruise–starring big-screen adaptation of the ’60s spy show with a Hitchcockian adventure that finds Cruise’s Ethan Hunt wrongly accused of treason and forced to take extreme measure to prove his innocence. Our biggest issue with Voyeur House is that virtually all of the sites are in Europe, so there may be some issues with the different time zones.For some reason, when you combine sunshine, water, and scantily-clad beach-goers, awkwardness is never far behind! Staring at the Wall was like staring at frustration itself, and it touched an anger in me,” John le Carré wrote in 1989, reflecting on his 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. He spent the first decades of the Cold War working in British intelligence, growing increasingly frustrated as the years piled up and channeling that frustration into a novel that depicts espionage as a dehumanizing occupation unfit for anyone with a conscience.