315 - The Courier

Eavesdropping at the Movies · Sep 22, 2021 · 33m

Benedict Cumberbatch gets himself embroiled in the Cuban Missile Crisis in The Courier, a dramatisation of the true story of Greville Wynne, a British businessman recruited by MI6 to smuggle Soviet secrets provided by high-ranking GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky. It's a film that offers pleasures in its performances and in the telling of a story you likely haven't heard, but its storytelling is often banal and sometimes unclear, and, José contends, it's full of tricks and tropes that are just there for effect - and often not very good ones. Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, set in a similar…