Top Espionage Movies, Part 7

Traitor (2008) / Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff / Stars: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Archie Panjabi, Saïd Taghmaoui

U.S. Special Operations officer Samir Horn (Cheadle, intense and utterly convincing, as always) is suspected of being a double agent as he infiltrates a cabal of radical Islamists.

Body of Lies (2008) / Director: Ridley Scott / Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani

A CIA agent in Jordan is caught between his American supervisors and local authorities as hunts a terrorist leader.

The Day of the Jackal (1973) / Director: Fred Zinnemann / Stars: Edward Fox, Terence Alexander, Michel Auclair, Alan Badel

A meticulous English assassin (Fox), known as the Jackal, is hired to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France.

Mission: Impossible II (2000) / Director: John Woo / Stars: Tom Cruise, Dougray Scott, Thandie Newton, Ving Rhames

The least pleasing of the four M:I films made with Cruise. In this outing, Agent Hunt (Cruise) goes to Sydney to destroy a genetically modified disease called Chimera. Features dreamy, acrobatic fight sequences, a signature of director Woo.

Notorious (1946) / Director: Alfred Hitchcock / Stars: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern

In this Hitchcock classic that doesn’t hold up as well as some of his later masterpieces, a woman (Bergman) spies on Nazis in South America.

The 39 Steps (1935) / Director: Alfred Hitchcock / Stars: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle

In this dated Hitchcock classic that helped invent the spy genre, a Londoner flees after being accused of killing a counterespionage agent he had befriended, and tries to stop foreign agents from stealing secrets.