Trailer: THE REPORT

Amazon Prime debuted the first trailer today for their upcoming film The Report,  Scott Z. Burns' thriller/expose about torture in the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program in the aftermath of 9/11. Burns is no stranger to the subject of spies and spy agencies, with writing credits on The Bourne Ultimatum (review here), The Informant!, and next year's Bond movie No Time to Die. He also penned an unmade version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. when Steven Soderbergh was attached to direct. Soderbergh is a producer on The Report, which stars Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Michael C. Hall, Tim Blake Nelson, Corey Stoll, Maura Tierney, and The Americans' Matthew Rhys. The Report premieres in theaters November 15th, and on Prime Video November 29th.

Trailer: OFFICIAL SECRETS

eOne Entertainment has released a trailer for the long-in-the-works movie about Katherine Gun, the GCHQ whilstleblower who exposed the faulty intelligence used to justify the second Iraq war. Official Secrets is based on the 2008 book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell. The title pretty much says it all, but Gun leaked an email to The Observer exposing an illegal U.S./UK intelligence operation designed to influence U.N. approval of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Keira Knightley (The Imitation Game), Matt Smith (Doctor Who), Matthew Goode (Kingsman: The Great Game), Rhys Ifans (Berlin Station), and Ralph Fiennes (Skyfall) star, with Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) directing. Official Secrets was first announced back in 2016, at which time Justin Chadwick (Spooks) was set to direct Natalie Dormer in the lead role, with a cast including Harrison Ford, Anthony Hopkins, and Martin Freeman. Clearly things changed, but the resulting movie still looks intriguing!

Tradecraft: Movie About Castro's Florida Sleepers "The Cuban Five" in Development

According to The Hollywod Reporter, there's a feature spy thriller in the works about the real-life Cuban spy ring known as "The Cuban Five." Based on Stephen Kimber’s book What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of The Cuban Five, The Cuban Five will tell the story of a cell of spies sent by the Castro government to spy on the Cuban exile community in Miami in the 1990s. They were arrested and convicted on espionage charges in 1998, and eventually exchanged in a spy swap in 2014. Clement Virgo (Rogue, Greenleaf) will direct, and Barrie Dunn wrote the screenplay. He and Kimber met with the actual agents in Cuba, and they have agreed to cooperate with the filmmakers. According to the trade, "Canadian indie producers Pictou Twist Pictures, Picture Plant and Conquering Lions Production have partnered with the ICAIC, Cuba's film institute, to co-produce [the film]."

Tradecraft: KINGSMAN Actress to Play Christine Keeler in New BBC Profumo Miniseries

Keeler photographed by Lewis Morley

Deadline reports that Kingsman actress Sophie Cookson (who was sadly underused in Matthew Vaughn's sequel) will play Christine Keeler in a new BBC drama about the infamous Profumo Affair, the Cold War scandal that involved sex and security implications, and ultimately brought down a British government in the early 1960s. No doubt that means we'll be seeing Cookson recreate the famous Lewis Morley portrait of Keeler before too long. The production has a spy-rich pedigree, coming from Fleming producers Ecosse Films and Apple Tree Yard writer Amanda Coe. Joanne Whalley previously portrayed Keeler in the 1989 feature film Scandal, opposite Ian McKellen as Profumo.

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: Amma Assante to Direct Tolkachev Movie BILLION DOLLAR SPY

Variety reports that British director Amma Asante (Belle) will helm a movie about legendary Cold War spy Adolf Tolkachev, based on David E. Hoffman’s book The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal. Tolkachev was the chief designer at the USSR’s Research Institute of Radio Engineering and became one of the CIA's top assets, delivering to the Agency tens of thousands of pages of highly classified documents about Soviet radar and other technologies between 1979 and 1985. Asante's most recent film, A United Kingdom, starred David Olyelowo (Spooks/MI-5) and Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day). Benjamin August, who penned Atom Egoyan's 2015 holocaust revenge drama Remember, starring Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau, will write the script. Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) will produce with Walden Media and Weed Road Pictures.

Tradecraft: THE IRREGULARS TV Series Explores Wartime Espionage Exploits of Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl

Buried in an exciting Deadline article about Paramount's latest attempt to reboot the venerable Matt Helm spy franchise was another item of note to spy fans. The writer who will be tackling the Donald Hamilton spy series, Tom Shepherd, has already adapted another great spy tome—this one non-fiction. Giving background on Shepherd, the trade mentioned that along with an upcoming Dr. Dolittle movie with Robert Downey Jr. and a period action-adventure spec script teaming up a young Agatha Christie with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to solve a baffling mystery, Shepherd has already written an adaptation of Jennet Conant's terrific Roald Dahl biography The Irregulars for Anonymous Content and Paramount TV. No further information is provided, but I would assume the format would be a limited series. (Or miniseries, as we used to call them.) The Irregulars focuses on Dahl's period as a British spy operating in Washington D.C. during WWII. The future Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author and You Only Live Twice screenwriter worked for Sir William Stephenson's BSC (British Security Coordination) after he was shot down early in the war and unable to continue as an aviator due to his injuries. In Washington, he was basically a gigolo for England ("the things I do for England," as 007 would quip in You Only Live Twice), seducing society wives with the goal of getting them to convince their powerful husbands that America should join the war and come to the aid of Great Britain. Ian Fleming and his friend Ivar Bryce also figure prominently in the narrative, Fleming having worked for British Naval Intelligence at the time and Bryce, eventually, for the American OSS. There's an amusing account of Dahl and Fleming competing for the affections of the same woman, and the revelation that Fleming gave Dahl the idea for one of his more famous short stories that would later be adapted into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The Irregulars is essential reading for anyone interested in Dahl, Fleming, James Bond, or wartime espionage (and a great companion piece to William Stevenson's famous Stephenson biography A Man Called Intrepid, or William Boyd's fabulous BSC novel Restless), and should make for great viewing as well. I'll definitely have my eyes open for more information on this project.

Tradecraft: Keira Knightley and Matt Smith Team for Katharine Gun Movie

Two years ago we heard about Official Secrets, a fact-based spy movie with an incredible cast about GCHQ whistle blower Katherine Gun. The all-star cast was to include Harrison Ford, Anthony Hopkins, Paul Bettany, and Martin Freeman, behind Game of Thrones' Natalie Dormer in the lead role. But as exciting as that cast sounded, nothing ever came of the movie. Now it's back on track, but reconfigured with a different cast. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Keira Knightley (The Imitation Game) and Matt Smith (Doctor Who) will now star in the revamped version of Official Secrets. Justin Chadwick (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Spooks) was originally set to direct, but now Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) will serve in that capacity.

Official Secrets is still based on the 2008 book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell. The title pretty much says it all, but Gun (who more closely resembles Dormer than Knightley) leaked an email to The Observer exposing an illegal U.S./UK intelligence operation designed to influence U.N. approval of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The film, financed by eOne (who will also distribute in certain territories), is set to start shooting next month.

Trailer: The Looming Tower

Hulu has released the first trailer for The Looming Tower, their upcoming event series about inter-agency friction between the CIA and FBI in the late 1990s that led to the intelligence failure of 9/11.  Based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book by Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower features Alec Baldwin as CIA Director George Tenet, Jeff Daniels as FBI counter-terrorism expert John O'Neill, Michael Stuhlbarg as counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke, among a huge ensemble cast.

The Looming Tower premieres February 28 on Hulu.

Tradecraft: Aldrich Ames Movie CIRCLE OF TREASON Moves Forward with Director

It's been a while since we heard of any progress on the movie version of CIA counterintelligence officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille's book Circle Of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, which was already filmed (quite effectively, I thought) as a 2014 ABC miniseries called The Assets. But the movie still lives! Yesterday, Deadline reported that Focus Features has set Massy Tadjedin to direct the film, working from a script by Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel, the writers currently penning the Edge of Tomorrow sequel for Doug Liman and Tom Cruise. Tadjedin is best known as a screenwriter (whose credits include the Daniel Craig movie The Jacket), but she also directed the 2010 Keira Knightley movie Last Night. Hopefully in the wake of Wonder Woman's success, we'll see even more female directors like Tadjedin given the opportunity to tell strong female-centered stories like this one. Circle of Treason tells the true story of how real-life female Smileys Grimes and Vertefeuille uncovered one of the most damaging moles in the history of the CIA, Aldrich Ames. Hindering their investigation more than Ames' Soviet handlers is the Agency's institutional chauvinism. It's a great book that already made a compelling (if notoriously under-watched) miniseries, and should make a terrific movie as well. I'll be interested to see who signs on to play Grimes and Vertefeuille, as they are both juicy roles that should attract top-caliber actresses. And, depending on how much screen time he ends up with, Ames himself should be a great role for a top-tier actor as well.

Senate Debates Spy Fiction, Including Jason Matthews

During his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee today, Attorney General Jeff Sessions engaged in a brief and somewhat baffling debate on spy fiction with Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). It was certainly surprising to hear the following exchange (which you can watch on CNN) occur on the Senate floor!

Cotton: Mr. Sessions, are you familiar with what spies call "tradecraft?"

Sessions: A little bit.

Cotton: That involves things like covert communications, and dead drops, and brush passes, right?

Sessions: That is part of it.

Cotton: Do you like spy fiction? John le Carré? Daniel Silva? Jason Matthews?

Sessions: Yeah. Alan Furst. David Ignatius... I just finished Ignatius's book.

Cotton: James Bond? Jason Bourne? Do you like Jason Bourne or James Bond movies?

To the last question, a giggling Sessions claims, "No..." then quickly admits, "Yes." I honestly thought for a second that some stenographer was going to end up transcribing a debate about who made the best 007! Weird as the exchange was (ultimately forming a basis for Cotton to compare allegations of collusion in Russia's tampering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election to fantastical espionage fiction), it does show that the two men have pretty good taste in spy writers. The inclusion of Jason Matthews (a former CIA officer) was especially apropos... or, I suppose, ironic, depending on your point of view.

The Kremlin's Candidate, the forthcoming final book in Matthews' trilogy that began with Red Sparrow (a book I selected as one of the ten best spy novels of the past decade) was at one time, according to a publisher's blurb posted last summer, supposed to deal with the exact topic being discussed at the hearing—Russian meddling in an American election! However, since the election it seems that the plot of the final novel has mutated somewhat as the book keeps being put off. I'm kind of surprised, because the original plot description seemed so literally torn from developing headlines that I would have thought Scribner would have done everything in their power to get it on shelves ASAP. Instead, they delayed the book until 2018 (ostensibly to tie in with the release of the Jennifer Lawrence movie of Red Sparrow, but last I heard the film was still slated for this fall), removed that original plot description, and replaced it with another, and then another, each one moving farther and farther away from the original, incredibly prescient premise. (The final version, sadly, sounds very much like a retread of the first two novels, when I was hoping for something different. I'm still looking forward to it, though, and hoping for the best!) Here is the publisher's original blurb, long since removed from Amazon and other retail sites.

The dazzling finale to the Red Sparrow Trilogy from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Jason Matthews, featuring star-crossed Russian agent Dominika Egorova and CIA’s Nate Nash caught up in a blackmail scandal with Vladimir Putin and the newly elected US President.

A junior American code clerk has defected to the Russians. He informs the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service that former US Secretary of Commerce Natalie Childers manipulated US global trade agreements to facilitate trade deals for the investment conglomerate owned by her husband. Natalie is now the Democratic presidential candidate, in the middle of a vigorous national campaign.

Meanwhile double agent Dominika Egorova is ordered by Vladimir Putin to begin work on a special operation in which Russia will inform candidate Childers that her malfeasance will be made public unless she agrees—if she is elected President—to order Pentagon budget cuts, to propose debilitating reforms in NATO, and to move toward the dissolution of the Atlantic Alliance. Refusal will result in scandal and her impeachment. When Dominika reports on her mission to her CIA handlers, Nate, Benford, Gable, and Forsyth, they know that any leak, any misstep, will trigger the Kremlin to go public, destroy the American democratic process, and discredit the country forever. But any counter to the operation moreover will expose Dominika as a CIA asset. Dominika decides they must eliminate the blackmailers: President Putin and his diabolical mastermind, the only two other Russians who know about the plan.

With a plot ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, The Kremlin’s Candidate is a riveting read if you've never read Jason Matthews, and a thrilling conclusion to the trilogy begun with Red Sparrow and Palace of Treason, which The New York Times Book Review called, “a primer in twenty-first-century spying...terrifically good.”

I want to read that book! Perhaps Matthews elected to change the plot because tomorrow's headlines too quickly became today's, and he feared the timeliness had worn off. Or perhaps it was a political decision, since the candidate in the book was clearly based on Hilary Clinton, perhaps under the assumption that she would win the election and he didn't want to risk impugning the current Administration. (That doesn't seem like a very good reason, as the book is ultimately fiction either way.) Or perhaps the decision was editorial rather than the author's. Whatever the reason, that surefire bestselling plot now seems to be out the door, replaced with one that sounds sort of like Matthews' take on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Here is the current description on Amazon:

Russian counterintelligence chief Colonel Dominika Egorova has been a recruited asset of the CIA, stealing Kremlin secrets for her CIA handler Nate Nash for over seven years. In the dazzling finale to the Red Sparrow Trilogy—which will be published right before the release of Red Sparrow, a major motion picture starring Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgarton—their forbidden and tumultuous love affair continues, mortally dangerous for them both, but irresistible.

In Washington, a newly installed US administration is selecting its Cabinet members. Dominika hears a whisper of a closely held Kremlin operation to place a mole inside a high intelligence position. But it’s worse than that: One of the three candidates under consideration has been a paid Russian spy for a decade, selling precious US secrets. If the Kremlin’s candidate for the position is confirmed, the Russians will have access to all the names of assets spying for CIA in Moscow, including Dominika’s. But which of the three individuals is the mole?

Dominika’s report triggers a desperate mole hunt before she’s exposed and arrested. Resisting all suggestions to defect and save herself, Dominika recklessly immerses herself in the palace intrigues of the Kremlin, searching for the mole’s name, and stealing as many of President Putin’s secrets for her CIA handlers before her time runs out—even as Putin’s dangerous interest in her grows. The treasure trove of her intelligence reporting sends Nate Nash and colleagues on desperate missions to Sevastopol, Istanbul, Khartoum, and Hong Kong.

With a plot ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, The Kremlin’s Candidate is a riveting read if you’ve never read Jason Matthews, and a thrilling conclusion to the trilogy begun with Red Sparrow and Palace of Treason, which The New York Times Book Review called, “a primer in twenty-first-century spying...terrifically good.”

As I said... I'm still excited to read it, either way! But it does seem like a strange (or appropriate) connection for this author to have come up for discussion at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on real Russian interference in a U.S. election. And it's still kind of hilarious that a Senator asked an Attorney General, under oath, if he likes James Bond movies!

Trailer for SAS Drama 6 DAYS

The first trailer is out for 6 Days, an SAS thriller about the same 1980 hostage standoff in the Iranian Embassy in London that inspired the action classic Who Dares Wins (aka The Final Option). Mark Strong (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Kingsman), Jamie Bell (TURN: Washington's Spies) and Abbie Cornish (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) star, along with the late Tim Pigott-Smith (Quantum of Solace) in one of his final performances and, in a nice touch, Who Dares Wins star Lewis Collins' old Professionals cohort, Martin Shaw. While there's still no release date officially set, Deadline recently reported that Vertical Entertainment "is eyeing a fall theatrical bow in the U.S. for the pic." Netflix is distributing in a number of international territories.

Tradecraft: Night Manager Producers Plot New Period Spy Drama

Deadline reports that The Ink Factory, the production company behind the hit John le Carré TV adaptation The Night Manager (along with films of his work including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, A Most Wanted Man and Our Kind of Traitor), is plotting a new spy drama. The company, run by two of le Carré’s sons, will partner with Rise Films and Film4 to develop a Cold War spy film not based on one of the author's novels. Instead, the inspiration for The American War, an espionage tale set against the backdrop of the fall of Saigon in the last days of the Vietnam War in 1975, will be two non-fiction memoirs by former CIA agent Frank Snepp: Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam and Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free Speech. Tom Morton-Smith, who wrote the acclaimed play "Oppenheimer," about the father of the atomic bomb, will pen the screenplay.

According to the trade, "the film will follow the rising tensions between the intelligence community and a U.S. administration whose refusal to accept the facts prompted a catastrophic compromise of vulnerable American and South Vietnamese personnel and their families, followed by a refugee crisis. Despite this system failure and heart-breaking betrayal, individual acts of heroism and Snepp’s own desperate last-minute efforts to persuade his superiors in Saigon to admit defeat resulted in the evacuation of many people." So, obviously, they're going for a very timely take on the material!

Tradecraft: Harrison Ford, Anthony Hopkins, Martin Freeman, Natalie Dormer and Paul Bettany Join Ensemble Spy Drama Official Secrets

Quite a cast has come together for the fact-based ensemble spy drama Official Secrets, about GCHQ whistleblower Katherine Gun. Deadline reports that former Jack Ryan Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger) will again play a CIA agent; Paul Bettany (A Beautiful Mind) and Martin Freeman (Sherlock) will play journalists; Anthony Hopkins (Mission: Impossible 2, The Looking Glas War) will play a retired British General, and Natalie Dormer (Elementary) will star as Gun, a linguist working for GCHQ (the UK's equivalent of the NSA). Directed by Justin Chadwick (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), a veteran of the hit UK TV show Spooks (known to Americans as MI-5), Official Secrets is based on the 2008 book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell. The title pretty much says it all, but Gun (who actually does kind of resemble Game of Thrones star Dormer) leaked an email to The Observer exposing an illegal U.S./UK intelligence operation designed to influence U.N. approval of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The intersection of espionage and journalism (explored to perfection in the 2003 miniseries State of Play) should be extremely fertile ground for contemporary films, though we've seen some misfires like The Fifth Estate (about Julian Assange) and ultimately, despite a thrilling first hour, Shoot the Messenger (about Gary Webb, who first reported on the CIA's involvement in L.A.'s crack epidemic). Let's hope that Chadwick manages to combine spies and conspiracy with the journalistic thrills of Oscar contender Spotlight. He's certainly got an impressive cast to work with!

There is no distributor yet, but according to the trade, "The Solution Entertainment Group’s Lisa Wilson and Myles Nestel are executive producing the feature film and handling financing and international sales beginning next month at EFM."

John le Carré to Publish Memoir in 2016

According to an announcement on his official website, spy novelist extraordinaire John le Carré will publish his memoirs in September of next year. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life will be le Carré's first non-fiction book, though he has dabbled in that field with articles, opinion pieces, numerous forwards and introductions, and an enthralling afterward to Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. Le Carré's life, of course, has comprised not only an astonishing writing career, but also an earlier career in espionage. Whatever he can reveal will no doubt make for fascinating reading!

According to the publisher's copy, The Pigeon Tunnel "opens up this extraordinary writing life for the first time. It is an exhilarating journey into the worlds of his ‘secret sharers’ – the men and women who inspired some of his most enthralling novels – and a testament to the author’s unique and personal engagement with the last half-century."

Beyond that, the author's literary agent Jonny Gellar of Curtis Brown promises "insights into the creative mind, tales of adventures in the movie trade, encounters with the great and the not-so-good, [and] intensely moving stories drawn from over 50 years of observing the world – told in prose other writers would envy," while Penguin Random House UK CEO Tom Weldon says, "The Pigeon Tunnel is the story of our times as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s greatest novelists."

The Pigeon Tunnel will be published in September 2016 in the UK in Viking Hardback and simultaneously in the USA and Canada by Penguin Random House. The audiobook will come out at the same time and be read by the author, which should be good. Le Carré is a gifted narrator, having demonstrated as much with abridged recordings of some of his novels and the unabridged audiobook of his most recent one, A Delicate Truth (which The Telegraph auspiciously selected earlier this year as the best audiobook of all time).

The timing of this announcement is somewhat curious, as it would seem to deliberately steal the thunder of Adam Sisman's John le Carré: The Biography, a nearly 700-page tome due out next month from Harper which had previously received the fiercely private author's official blessing. (Le Carré has famously sued to prevent other such publications in the past.) Le Carré has said before that the semi-autobiographical elements of A Perfect Spy were the closest he would ever come to penning a memoir (though The Naive and Sentimental Lover has also been described as a fictionalized accounts of events from the author's own life), so this decision is clearly a fairly recent one. I wonder if it was inspired by Sisman's manuscript – either because the author liked it and felt encouraged to go further, or didn't like it and felt the need to set the record straight himself?

Tradecraft: Stone's Snowden Seeks Refuge in 2016

Spy-jammed 2015 has lost one more defector to 2016. Following in the footsteps of Grimsby and London Has Fallen, Oliver Stone's Edward Snowden movie Snowden has been pushed back to next year. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film won't be ready in time for its previously announced Christmas release date. The move, of course, puts the fact-based drama out of awards contention for this year. And if 007 producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson are still intent on producing their own Snowden movie after they finish up with SPECTRE, Stone's move to an unspecified date next year will narrow the gap between the competing pictures. Stone's Snowden stars Joseph Gordon Levitt (Looper), Shailene Woodley (White Bird in a Blizzard), Timothy Olyphant (Hitman), Zachary Quinto (Hitman: Agent 47), Melissa Leo (The Equalizer), Tom Wilkinson (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) and Nicholas Cage (The Rock).

Trailer for Michael Bay's CIA Attack Drama 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

The first of the (at least) three Benghazi siege movies currently in the pipeline already has a trailer. Get your first glimpse at Michael Bay's fact-based drama 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which tells the story of the deadly September 2012 siege on the U.S. diplomatic compound and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, diplomat Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty lost their lives. I'm not sure I find Bay's ultra-glossy Transformers-style direction appropriate to such a tragic story, but the cast, including John Krasinski (Aloha), James Badge Dale (Rubicon), Max Martini (Captain Phillips) and Toby Stephens (Die Another Day) is solid, and the script is by Chuck Hogan (The Town), so I guess I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi opens in January.

Teaser for Oliver Stone's Snowden

Open Road has released the teaser for Oliver Stone's Snowden. As previously reported, this is the first of at least two projects in the works about the equally famous and infamous NSA whistleblower or traitor (depending on your point of view) Edward Snowden. The second one, somewhat surprisingly, hails from the James Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. Snowden's all-star cast includes Shailene Woodley (White Bird in a Blizzard), Timothy Olyphant (Hitman), Scott Eastwood (Fury), Nicholas Cage (The Rock), Zachary Quinto (Hitman: Agent 47), Melissa Leo (The Equalizer), Tom Wilkinson (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol), Joely Richardson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Rhys Ifans (Elementary), and, in the title role, Joseph Gordon Levitt. Snowden opens this Christmas.

Trailer: Bridge of Spies

We saw the poster yesterday; today comes our first look at Steven Spielberg's Cold War spy thriller Bridge of Spies in a fantastic trailer. Pretty much every shot is pure catnip for Sixties spy buffs. It's pretty amazing that we're getting two big spy movies set in that period this year—The Man From U.N.C.L.E. for Bondian fantasy and this for gritty, fact-based drama. I can't wait to see both movies!

Tradecraft: Doug Liman and Tom Cruise Plot CIA Drug Flight

Doug Liman loves directing spy movies. Tom Cruise loves starring in spy movies. Doug Liman directed Tom Cruise in last year's surprisingly excellent sci-fi war movie Edge of Tomorrow. Was it inevitable that the director and star would re-team to work in the genre they both seem to love? Perhaps. Deadline reports that Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Fair Game) will direct Cruise (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Knight and Day) in Mena, which follows what the trade describes as the "outrageous exploits of Barry Seal, a hustler and pilot unexpectedly recruited by the CIA to run one of the biggest covert operations in U.S. history." In the early 1980s, Seal flew drug smuggling runs out of the Mena, Arkansas airport, allegedly in part at the behest of the CIA. With Agency surveillance equipment, he photographed members of the infamous Medellin Cartel loading drug shipments onto his plane in Nicaragua, supposedly with the cooperation of the Sandinista government. The Reagan administration used one of his photographs to bolster support for rebel guerrillas known as the Contras, who the CIA was funding in contravention of the U.S. Congress's Boland Amendment as part of an elaborate operation that became known as the Iran-Contra Scandal. Liman's father, Arthur Liman, was Chief Counsel in the Senate's investigation of the Iran-Contra Scandal and conducted the televised hearings that fascinated the nation in the summer of 1987 and made household names out of people like Oliver North and William Casey. (I still remember that summer as one interminably boring evenings for a 9-year-old, when the TV aired night after night of old guys talking instead of baseball or Bond movies on ABC. Now, of course, I find the subject fascinating.) Liman has previously cited his father's involvement as giving him his fascination with spies and espionage, so no doubt this is a story he's itching to tell.

"I love stories of improbable heroes working against the system," Liman told the trade, "and Barry Seal took the government, and our country, for an unbelievable ride. Interpreting his story has the makings for an entertaining film that is equal parts satire, suspense and comedy—and always surprising." Mena will be at least the third movie in production this year to tell an aspect of the Iran-Contra Affair. We learned about two more last fall.

Universal has staked out a January 6, 2017 release date for Mena, evidently encouraged by the huge box office that particular berth garnered for another true story boasting a big star, American Sniper. Besides Cruise, the film stars Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina, About Time), Sarah Wright (Parks and Rec), Jesse Plemons (Friday Night Lights, The Missionary) , Caleb Landry Jones (X-Men: First Class), Jayma Mays (Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd Out of CONTROL), Benito Martinez (The Shield, 24), E. Roger Mitchell (Kill the Messenger), Lola Kirke (Free the Nipple) and Alejandro Edda (The Bridge), with Robert Farrior (Stop-Loss) as Oliver North.