Based on a John LeCarre novel, Tinker Tailor is a cold war espionage thriller about an MI-6 officer who is resurrected from a shameful forced retirement to ferret out a Russian infiltrator from the British intelligence service.
This film stands out for a host of reasons. Tinker Tailor is complicated, as a spy thriller should be, but without being overly dense. The pace of the film is incredibly deliberate, but never butt-cheek numbingly slow. It's as realistic an international spy movie as I can imagine (and having been rejected by the CIA in my twenties, imagination is all I have to go on), without ever feeling documentary. When the closing credits rolled, I felt as though I had just seen a compelling "action" movie, and yet Tinker offers a generally quiet tone and nary a car chase.
