chris I am a huge fan of John le Carre novels and only recently found out that this movie had been made. Having only recently read the book I was nervously excited about this. I was nervous because the book is extremely complex and was worried about how this would transfer to film. I also wasn't sure that I could see Connery and Pfeiffer in the leading roles but I was delighted to have my fears crushed by an extremely accomplished performance all round. The acting, the script, the location shots and musical score fitted absolutely perfectly. Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer were fantastic in their roles which I genuinely didn't expect. The story is complex and takes a fair amount of concentration and discipline to follow - but it's worth it if you want to make the most of this grossly underrated adaptation that's true to form and loyal to Le Carre's style.

Matthew_Capitano I read John LeCarre's book and I never thought a movie version could be as boring, but somehow, it was.Sean Connery is expectedly appealing, but one can tell he only did this movie so he could get a free trip to Russia. Michelle Pfeiffer is cute, though she appears to have bitten off more than she can chew here. Nice Russian cityscapes, but the musical soundtrack drones on endlessly in the background. It would be difficult to recommend this film over LeCarre's novel - both are convoluted. One of those flicks where you can fall asleep for 10 minutes and then wake up with the feeling that you haven't missed anything. Snooze City.

rickv404 Is it just me or does Sean Connery have a good track record for making uninteresting movies, particularly where he's the main character? This is much like "Cuba", another bore from him from over a decade earlier. The only movie by him I really liked was the Hitchcock film "Marnie" and he wasn't the central character in that. Watch him as James Bond, though he's far from the best Bond, in my opinion, and his Sixties' Bond is rather tepid compared to the later ones, including Roger Moore. Don't get me started on other stinkers from him, like "Outland", "The Name of the Rose", "The Offence", "The Hunt for Red October", "The Man who would be King", "Rising Sun", "The Molly Maguires", "Wrong is Right"...

robert-temple-1 She not only does the accent, she looks the part. Michelle Pfeiffer as a Russian woman makes this Cold War tale retain its interest, and as for Sean Connery, for once he has an actual rounded character to play, complete with eccentricities, and he does it splendidly. This is a highly successful adaptation of a John le Carre novel. Of course it is all predicated on the menace of the Cold War, even though there is much talk of 'glasnost', photos of Gorbachev are now hanging on the walls, and things are meant to be loosening up in Russia. (In fact this was the first Western film ever made there.) But the Soviet Union still exists, so that this is one of the last big spy movies based upon the Soviet threat. With this film, John le Carre's spy world went out not with a whimper but with a bang. It is a rattling good tale, and well worth the watch today. The supporting actors are very good: Roy Scheider, Klaus Maria Branauer, James Fox, Michael Kitchen, Ken Russell (yes, the director), David Threlfall, and others. Russell gets a bit hysterical in some of his scenes, but one would expect that from him. Brandauer has his usual magnetic intensity. Kitchen is cozy, like the sort of thing you sit in for your cuppa tea. The story itself does have some inert elements, since a group of spy masters sitting around in a control room getting remote signals all the time from Moscow is hard to make dynamic, no matter how many snide remarks they keep making to each other, and how much artificial tension is generated by ambiguous signals which confuse and worry them. One could easily pick no end of holes in the plot. But why should one? The film overcomes all these weaknesses and carries us right along. Somebody somewhere has forgotten how to make good spy stories simply, and the ones being made at the moment are generally too 'busy', leaving little room to breathe between surprises, and characters are too often two-dimensional. Here the two leads are not only written in the round (a clever script by Tom Stoppard helps!), they are played in the round by two real pros. Fred Schepisi does a wonderful job of directing. All good fun, and it really takes you back. It seems only yesterday that Red Square inspired more fear by far than the wastes of Waziristan, or whatever pale substitute for fear we are meant to be quivering about today. This film was shot on location in Lisbon, Moscow, and St. Petersburg (then still Leningrad), and there is a lot of magnificent cinematography, so that the film is partly a travelogue showing us glimpses of wonderful things. It is such a shame that they had to cut away from some of those shots in the interests of the storyline and not linger over them, such as the amazing roof in Lisbon and some glimpses of the Russian countryside, which are so tantalizingly brief.