10 Greatest Spy Thrillers of the Last 100 Years, Ranked

Spy movies and thrillers are a natural pairing, producing suspenseful, tension-filled stories that range from quiet realism to blockbuster spectacle. The list covers the genre across the last century, tracing a line from Hollywood’s Golden Age with films like Notorious to Daniel Craig’s Bond era with titles such as Skyfall.

The selections highlight how diverse the form can be: John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold stands as a bleak, anti‑Bond portrait of Cold War espionage, while Casino Royale and Skyfall reinvent and deconstruct the Bond formula for the modern era. Other entries underline different strengths of the genre — The Hunt for Red October as a taut submarine thriller, The Day of the Jackal for its meticulous plotting, The Manchurian Candidate for its satirical bite, North by Northwest as a near‑perfect mistaken‑identity thriller, Notorious for Hitchcock’s blend of romance and suspense, and The Lives of Others as an acclaimed surveillance drama that won the 2007 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

United States, Hollywood

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