Trailer for Park Chan-Wook's John le Carré Miniseries THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL

AMC has released the first full trailer for their latest BBC co-production, a follow-up to the hugely successful 2016 John le Carré adaptation The Night Manager. This time the same producers at The Ink Factory (including le Carré and his sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell) chose to tackle the author's 1983 tome The Little Drummer Girl, and they brought on the great Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) to direct. The imagery in this trailer is as haunting and awesome as I expected from him! The Little Drummer Girl follows Charlie, a naive young English actress recruited by Israeli Intelligence into the "theater of the real"– to infiltrate a Palestinian terror organization. She soon finds herself seduced by both sides and caught in the middle. Florence Pugh (King Lear) stars as Charlie, Alexander Skarsgård (Big Little Lies) plays Becker, the enigmatic stranger who seduces, recruits, and eventually handles her, and Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water) plays a ruthlessly clever, masterfully manipulative, somewhat Smiley-like Mossad spymaster, Kurtz. The miniseries will air on AMC over three consecutive nights in two-hour episodes, premiering November 19 at 9 PM ET/PT. Additional episodes will air at 9 ET/PT on November 20 and November 21. It's expected to play on BBC in the UK around the same time.

Trailer: Netflix's THE ANGEL

Netflix has unveiled the trailer for their real-life 1970s period spy drama The Angel. Israeli helmer Ariel Vroman (Criminal) directs from a script by David Arata (Children of Men), based on the book by Uri Bar-Joseph, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel. Marwan Kenzari, Toby Kebbell, Hannah Ware, Waleed Farouq Zuaiter, Maisa Abd Elhadi and Sasson Gabai star in the Middle East-set story of Ashraf Marwan, a spy whose actions demonstrably shaped history. The Angel debuts September 16 on the streaming service.

Tradecraft: BETHLEHEM Director to Adapt Mossad Tale THE ENGLISH TEACHER

Yuval Adler's Bethlehem (2013) is the best spy movie of the last decade that no one has seen. It's truly a must-watch for any fans of gritty, le Carré-esque espionage yarns with only shades of grey and no easy answers. (It also made my list of the 10 Best Spy Movies of the last 10 years.) Which is why it's great news that Adler will be returning to the genre with an adaptation of former Israeli intelligence officer Yiftach Reicher Atir's bestselling novel The English Teacher! Only it won't be called that. According to Deadline, Adler's film version will be called The Operative (admittedly more generic), and star Eric Bana (Hanna, Munich) and Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds). Though it's been in my stack for a while, I still haven't read The English Teacher. (This news will probably inspire me to move it up a few notches!) But here's the publisher's description:

After attending her father’s funeral, former Mossad agent Rachel Goldschmitt empties her bank account and disappears. But when she makes a cryptic phone call to her former handler, Ehud, the Mossad sends him to track her down. Finding no leads, he must retrace her career as a spy to figure out why she abandoned Mossad before she can do any damage to Israel. But he soon discovers that after living under cover for so long, an agent’s assumed identity and her real one can blur, catching loyalty, love, and truth between them. In the midst of a high-risk, high-stakes investigation, Ehud begins to question whether he ever knew his agent at all.

Bethlehem Trailer

American distributor Adopt Films have released an English language trailer (via Deadline) for Bethlehem, a stunning le Carré-esque spy movie set against the present day Israeli-Palestinian conflict that examines the psychological toll of espionage on its practitioners. Bethlehem, which already bagged six Ophir Awards (the Istraeli Academy Awards), was Israel's official submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but shockingly didn't make the final cut. Directed by first-time helmer Yuval Adler and co-written by the Israeli Adler and Palestinian journalist Ali Wakad, Bethlehem tells a very Cold War type of spy story set in the titular city, about an agent of Israel's Shin Bet and his Palestinian asset torn between two masters and two worlds, the teenage brother of a wanted terrorist with ties to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and Hamas. And it's a truly fantastic movie, one of the best serious spy films in years. I saw a festival screening earlier this year, and in a Q&A afterwards the director cited le Carré as an inspiration - and when I say the influence was obvious, regular readers will know that I mean that as high praise indeed! U.S. spy fans should definitely check this one out when it's released in limited markets on February 21, 2014.