Ever notice how movies like Safe House almost always make the Central Intelligence Agency the bad guy? TIME looks back at some of the most memorable flicks starring the secretive organization.
“I’m not a field agent, I just read books!” As directed by Sydney Pollack and starring his long-time collaborator Robert Redford (the two did seven films together), Condor is a fine piece of mid-70′s paranoia. A bookish CIA officer operating out of the New York-based “American Literary Historical Society,” Joe Turner’s job is to read lots and make connections. He goes out to pick up sandwiches for his co-workers, comes back to find everyone blown away, goes on the run, hijacks Faye Dunaway and the pair have soft-lit 70′s sex. Max von Sydow tries to kill him, but he’s too old. It’s all very 70′s, as evidenced by the jazz-funk stylings of the title sequence. Which makes sense, for between this, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, and The Conversation, that decade almost perfected the paranoid thriller genre.
Matt Damon is at his most blank-faced in this tale detailing the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency. He’s literally a cipher. His wife doesn’t know him, his odd-faced son doesn’t know him, and we don’t know him. Damon gives nothing away—his face as stone-cold immobile here as it is in the Bourne films, which pretty much means he’s perfect for the role.
Directed by Robert De Niro, Shepherd has an all-star cast of gravelly-voiced, suspicious-looking men: Alec Baldwin, Joe Pesci, William Hurt, John Turturro, and De Niro himself. The movie is swaddled in hushed-tone secret telling, and everyone’s face looks drawn tight with the sheer effort of keeping mum. Slow-moving and grim, The Good Shepherd makes the list through sheer definitiveness.
