THE COURIER 12

OUT NOW CINEMAS

Areal-life spy drama that’s actually about a businessman (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Greville Wynne), who’s the perfect candidate for ferrying messages to Soviet defector Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). The storytelling’s stolid, with few narrative surprises, but this is a compelling insight into the everyday jeopardy of the early-’60s Cold War. The biggest plus is a tailor-made role for Cumberbatch, though it’s when things take an inevitable turn for the worse that the star truly impresses with a committed and startling physical transformation. Simon Kinnear