Top 15 Best Spy Movies

A man is fished out of the Mediterranean with bullet wounds, amnesia and a Swiss bank account number implanted in his hip. Jason Bourne's search for his own identity redefined modern spy action with handheld cameras and razor-sharp close combat.

Bourne is hiding in Goa, but a CIA frame-up forces him back into the shadow world. Paul Greengrass ramps up the intensity with a Moscow car chase, cutting betrayal and that iconic rolled-up magazine fight.

Daniel Craig debuts as a raw 00 rookie: bleeding, bluffing and heartbreak suddenly come with the license. A parkour prologue, a nerve-racking poker game and a fragile romance put human cracks in Bond's armor.

Paris, Madrid, New York: Bourne races across continents to finally settle the score with Treadstone. The Waterloo Station sequence alone is real-time spy suspense at its best.

In smoky MI6 offices, the introverted George Smiley hunts for a Soviet mole at the top of 'the Circus'. Trench coats, tape reels and silent glances replace bullets, but the paranoia is deadlier than ever.

Bond balances on the edge of his own grave while cyberterrorist Silva targets M and MI6. Sam Mendes mixes Shakespearean family drama, a neon Shanghai and Scottish mist into a visual epic.

CIA researcher Joe Turner steps out for lunch and returns to an office full of bodies. What follows is 72 hours of running, with trust and suspicion at zero. Watergate-era paranoia on celluloid, with Robert Redford at his best.

Advertising man Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a nonexistent agent. The result: the crop-duster attack, a cliffhanger on Mount Rushmore and Hitchcock defining suspense.

On his last day before retirement, handler Robert Redford has 24 hours to save his protégé Brad Pitt from a Chinese prison. Flashbacks, double-dealing and Tony Scott's style make this mentor thriller as cunning as its title.

Bond swaps casinos for shadow games in Istanbul: a coveted decoding machine, a poison-tipped shoe and one of the franchise's first real gadgets. A Cold War classic with a legendary fight aboard the Orient Express.

A burnt-out agent pretends to defect, but the Cold War double game exacts a merciless price. Pitch-black morality, the Berlin Wall and Richard Burton's icy gaze.

007's film debut: Caribbean beaches, a villain's lair on Crab Key and Ursula Andress' iconic white bikini. Bond DNA in its original form: suave, ruthless and full of exotic danger.

An anonymous hired assassin plans to kill French President de Gaulle. Political procedure meets clinical suspense; every passport stamp feels like a tick of the time bomb.

Name one Bond villain, one theme song, one deadly bowler hat... pop culture still breathes Fort Knox gold and the Aston Martin's ejector seat. The film that made watching spies a guilty pleasure.

A videotape of a political murder slipped into his shopping bag puts lawyer Will Smith on the NSA's radar. Satellite surveillance, micro-bugs and Tony Scott's hyper-editing create an adrenaline shot that predicted the surveillance state, with Gene Hackman as a paranoid ex-operative.