Alison Rowat reviews Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance

With: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance

Runtime: 141 minutes

NEVER mind pina coladas, getting caught the rain, and making love at midnight. If you like Cold War tales from the Sixties, snow, big overcoats, and Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg doing that thing they do with liberal values (preach ‘em), then Bridge of Spies will be right up your strasse.

Hanks plays Brooklyn insurance lawyer James B Donovan, a man who can pretty much fast talk his way in and out of anything. Even he, however, baulks at a call to defend the mysterious Rudolf Abel (Wolf Hall’s Mark Rylance with an accent that starts off rather Scots and wanders far and wide), who has been caught red-handed spying for the Russkies. It’s the late 50s, a young pilot by the name of Gary Powers has yet to become famous, but the Rosenbergs have been and gone. Even thinking about defending a spy is seen as an un-American activity, so who better than Hanks and Spielberg, four films together so far, to turn assumptions around?

Working from a screenplay by the Coen brothers and Matt Charman, Spielberg and Hanks turn in an old fashioned tale of a spy swap that owes a nod to Saving Private Ryan plus many a secret service yarn that has gone before. It is slow and steady, it is a long way from le Carre, there is too much eye twinkling for that, but this is a solidly entertaining, classy picture.