The Courier

Dominic Cooke's The Courier premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 in the Premieres strand and was the festival's highest-profile pre-pandemic acquisition before COVID delays pushed its commercial release into 2021. The film is the second feature from Cooke (the former artistic director of London's Royal Court Theatre) after On Chesil Beach (2017), and reunites him with screenwriter Tom O'Connor and Benedict Cumberbatch's production company SunnyMarch. The story is drawn from the documentary record of the Penkovsky case, principally Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin's The Spy Who Saved the World (1992).

Cumberbatch leads as Greville Wynne; the Georgian actor Merab Ninidze (The Empress, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) plays Oleg Penkovsky in a performance that the British and US press greeted as a quiet revelation. Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) plays the CIA's Moscow case officer Emily Donovan and Jessie Buckley plays Wynne's wife Sheila. Cinematography is by Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave, Widows); the score is by Abel Korzeniowski.

Critical reception was warm (The Telegraph, Variety and Empire singled out the central pairing) and Cumberbatch was nominated for the British Independent Film Award for Best Actor. The film has become standard reference viewing in Cold-War history courses, particularly on the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis to which the Penkovsky material directly contributed.