BRIDGE OF SPIES

On Friday 18^th at 4pm: Spielberg’s historical drama film,  BRIDGE OF SPIES (2h15mins). Based on true events.

The film received critical acclaim. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 91%. The site’s critical consensus reads, “Bridge of Spies finds new life in Hollywood’s classic Cold War espionage thriller formula, thanks to reliably outstanding work from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks”

In 1957, lawyer James B. Donovan is recruited from his prestigious law firm to defend accused Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. It’s an unenviable task in many respects. Donovan hasn’t practiced criminal law since he was a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials after World War II. Also, the strong anti-Communist mood at the time makes him a target from who think Abel should just be executed. Abel is convicted but Donovan convinces the judge to sentence him to prison, rather than execute him, as they may at some point in the future want to swap him for an American spy the Soviets might have in custody. Just such a scenario comes into play when in 1960 U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers is shot down over Soviet territory and taken prisoner. Donovan is again recruited to act as the intermediary and negotiate swapping Able for the American requiring him to travel to East Berlin crossing the newly built Berlin Wall.

Richard Roeper of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and praised Spielberg’s direction, saying: “Spielberg has taken an important but largely forgotten, and hardly action-packed slice of the Cold War, and turned it into a gripping character study, and thriller that feels a bit like a John Le Carre adaptation if Frank Capra were at the controls”. Michael Phillips of Chicago Tribune called the film “a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol”. The A.V. Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky described it as “one of the most handsome movies of Spielberg’s latter-day phase, and possibly the most eloquent. Bridge of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game”. Thomas Sotinel of the French newspaper Le Monde praised the film for harkening back to “classic American cinema”, noting Spielberg’s virtuosic illustration of the mechanisms of Cold War politics.

“The Coen brothers writing a movie Steven Spielberg would direct just sounds like a winning combination and it really was. Sealing the deal, was a great performance by Tom Hanks.

Tom Hanks does what he does best, by playing an everyday man in an average life. James Donovan was just an insurance lawyer who gets caught up in the middle of the Cold War. Bridge of Spies, starts him off so normal and then turns his life into quite an adventure.

And I do mean adventure. In the hands of Spielberg, the movie’s visuals were large and epic. I was expecting this movie to feel more like, Lincoln. Instead it feels more like Indiana Jones, as James Donovan travels to Berlin at the time when the wall was being completed.

Watching Hanks play Donovan who is just swept into an overwhelming situation and just keeps his cool and his charm is just highly enjoyable.

Totally loved Bridge of Spies, It’s one of the best team ups between Hanks and Spielberg and even though Lincoln was a great movie, Bridge of Spies is everything Spielberg is capable of. So entertaining.”