The Cold War told in ten films

With the release of Benedict Cumberbatch’s true life spy thriller The Courier, ten films about the era of (relatively) passive aggression between the Superpowers.

Director Dominic Cooke’s new picture The Courier is based on the exploits of businessman-turned-MI6 agent spy Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), who in the early 1960s smuggled Soviet secrets to the West from his GRU contact, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (Georgian actor Merab Ninidze).

The pair are eventually captured when the businessman travels to Moscow; Wynne faces 8 years’ incarceration at Moscow’s grim Lubyanka Prison, whilst Penkovsky is executed for treason.

The prospect of another Cold War has been a familiar refrain over recent years, with events such as the 2018 Skripal poisonings, ransomware attacks and last week’s arrest of suspected Russian agent David Smith in Berlin all pointing to a return to the paranoia and proxy wars that existed between 1947 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.