SKYFALL

The best Bond movie in the last ten years was probably X-Men: First Class or maybe Michel Hazanavicius's deft parodies OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  The last three Bond films have been surgical procedures, designed to remove any last trace of fun, color, or personality from a franchise built on them.  In this film, right from the beginning I knew I was in trouble.  Bond opens a door and finds a room full of bloody murdered agents.  Ah, the childish fun of a Bond movie!

SAFE HOUSE

Bland but capable Ryan Reynolds is a CIA agent based in Cape Town South Africa who badly wants a promotion to another more glamorous assignment in another more glamorous city like Paris.  It's his lucky day!  Denzel Washington plays an infamous traitor (with the unlikely name of Tobin Frost) who turns himself in and gets water boarded by the T-1000 before mercenaries show up and start executing everybody.  Denzel Washington could play this part in his sleep and probably did.  On paper, the similarities to Training Day (boring vanilla lead pulled in over his head by morally gray Denzel) must have seemed like a surefire bet.  But in practice there are no quotable lines, no memorable events, and no chance at the Oscars.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

Gary Oldman is George Smiley, the ultimate spy, a man who is seemingly devoid of emotion.  There are a few glimmers of personality to be sure.  But the man is a cipher, never betraying his thoughts or feelings to anyone around him.  His colleagues all fall prey to their emotions.  Every other character lets their heart make decisions where their brain should, especially considering they work in Cold War era espionage.  The other characters fall in love when they shouldn't, and sleep with their co-workers, coworkers spouses, enemies, and enemies' spouses.  They hold on to petty personal grudges and grievances, and let them cloud their judgement and their conduct.  And as for the mole...  his motivations are ambiguous but certainly not rational.  These characters make the critical mistake that Martin Sheen advised against in The Departed: "We practice deception, but not self-deception."

FAREWELL (2009)

This film is quite accurately described by Netflix as the 'thinking man's spy thriller'.  It has a lot more in common with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than it does with Goldfinger.  In the early 1980's a Soviet Intelligence Colonel, thoroughly disillusioned with the broken promises of his government, starts leaking information in an effort to bring down the USSR.  Because the information he wants to leak concerns the network of Soviet spies in the Western world, especially their intelligence agencies, he decides to leak the information through an unusual channel: a French engineer working in Moscow who smuggles the information back home to Paris and passes it along to a friend in the DST, the domestic intelligence agency of France, thereby completely bypassing the already comprised traditional foreign intelligence routes.  If that description already scares you, then you should know it only covers the first ten or fifteen minutes.