The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

15. 2011 - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Honourable Mentions: Drive, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Shame

It's a bit unusual, perhaps, that a brooding, Cold War-era throwback spy movie ended up being one of the best and most successful films of 2011, but sometimes the chips just fall in a really cool way like that.

One of several adaptations of the great John le Carré's spy novels (the best undoubtedly being 1965's Richard Burton-starring The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy stars Gary Oldman as MI5 agent George Smiley (a role previously played by Alec Guinness in a successful BBC mini-series adaptation), in a story based on le Carré's own experience working for the security services during the Cambridge Five scandal of the 1960s. Alfredson's film is as messy and complex as the source material but rendered somewhat unlavishly, its stripped-back components amplifying the sense of dour paranoia that became a calling card of seventies espionage fiction.

Oldman gives a typically committed performance as Smiley, with the cast rounded out by a just-as-impressive ensemble comprised of Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, Colin Firth and Mark Strong. One that isn't to be missed, even with the likes of Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo garnering more lasting attention in the years since.