Steven Spielberg’s next film, spy thriller Bridge Of Spies, teams him up again with with his old Saving Private Ryan and **The Terminal **cohort Tom Hanks for what’s shaping up to be a heart-stopping Cold War thriller. It has a new poster that recalls the Saul Bass-inspired opening credits of another Hanks/Spielberg movie, Catch Me If You Can, and more recently that stylish falling man Mad Men aesthetic. It’s also got a big photo of Tom Hanks on it, which we’re always in favour of.
May 1, 1960. While American moviegoers were watching David Niven and Doris Day hamming it up Please Don't Eat the Daisies, US pilot Gary Powers’s U2 spy plane was plunging through Russian airspace after a Soviet SAM missile put pay to his covert mission. Next to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the incident's fallout brought America and the Soviet Union as close to the brink as two Cold War nations would come without actually teetering over the edge. Into this Cold War cool box comes Tom Hanks’ James Donovan, an insurance lawyer who finds himself charged with preventing Judgment Day happening for real.
Donovan is responsible for negotiating Powers' (Austin Stowell) release. Mark Rylance co-stars as Rudolf Abel, a suspected KGB spy who was defended by Donovan in a US courtroom in 1957, and is, thanks to back-channel negotiation, the likely swap for Powers in a deal with the Soviets. It’s an agreement that doesn’t exactly sit well for America at large, and Donovan and his family, including wife Mary (Amy Ryan), feel the brunt of the protests.
Bridge Of Spies arrives in the UK on November 6.