Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) is a model of how to adapt the seemingly unadaptable. John le Carré's dense 1974 novel had already been a celebrated BBC serial with Alec Guinness; Alfredson, the Swedish director of Let the Right One In, compresses its labyrinth of betrayal into just over two hours without sacrificing its chill. A British-French-German production, it screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival and became one of the most acclaimed espionage films of its era.

Gary Oldman plays George Smiley, the watchful, bespectacled spymaster recalled to root out a double agent at the top of the Circus, in a performance of immense stillness that earned him his first Academy Award nomination. Around him moves an extraordinary ensemble — Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Strong — while Hoyte van Hoytema's wintry cinematography and Alberto Iglesias's mournful score conjure a Britain of beige offices, cigarette smoke and quiet menace.

The film won BAFTAs for Outstanding British Film and Adapted Screenplay and three European Film Awards, and drew Oscar nominations for Oldman, the screenplay and Iglesias's music. Critics admired its confidence in slowness, its trust that an attentive audience would follow a plot built from glances and silences rather than action. It stands as a high-water mark of the modern spy film — a thinking person's thriller that finds dread not in gunfire but in the corrosion of loyalty.