Six spy films to watch this weekend

As Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending, time-travelling espionage extravaganza Tenet finally makes it to British cinemas (America, amusingly, has to wait a while longer) and with the much-delayed release of the new James Bond film No Time To Die apparently just a few months away now, big-budget films dealing with glossy espionage in all its forms are very much in demand. Yet cinema of the past couple of decades has found numerous different ways to portray spying, from the banal to the glossily explosive. It has encompassed literary adaptations, unrecognisable resurrections of Sixties television shows, deconstructed Cold War sagas and even sly updates of classic Seventies films. Here are half a dozen of the very best.

Spy Game

The list begins and ends with films by the late, great Tony Scott, both of which tip their hat to much-loved masterpieces in the genre decades before. The oddly underrated Spy Game is, on the surface, a straightforward enough caper, dealing with CIA veteran Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) and his attempts to extricate his young protégé Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) from captivity and potential execution in China, combined with comprehensive flashbacks showing their working relationship throughout the Seventies and Eighties.

Yet