01 A teenage girl raised and trained as an assassin is finally sent out into the real world.
50 Best Spy Movies of All Time
By Vlad Zakh · June 7, 2026
Action intensethought provoking
The spy movie has room for both a martini-drinking playboy and a burned-out Cold War operative doing something genuinely unglamorous, and this list runs the full range across seven decades.
01 
02 An FBI agent is pulled into a black-ops task force targeting a Mexican drug cartel.
03 Retired Mossad agents confront the truth behind a mission they lied about for thirty years.
04 A drone strike on a terror cell is delayed by an agonizing debate over one civilian bystander.
05 A German intelligence operative tracks a Chechen refugee who may be tied to terrorist financing.
06 A Russian ballerina is coerced into becoming a state-trained seductress and spy.
07 An MI6 agent races through divided Berlin to recover a list that could expose every operative in the field.
08 A widow is pursued by men convinced her late husband hid a fortune, and no one is who they claim.
09 A reluctant, working-class British agent investigates a string of kidnapped scientists.
10 A CIA analyst's decade-long obsession culminates in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
11 A Stasi surveillance officer slowly turning against the system he serves.
12 A war hero returns home secretly brainwashed into becoming a political assassin.
13 A CIA analyst returns from lunch to find his entire office murdered, with no idea why.
14 Israeli agents hunt down the organizers of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
15 A fake movie production is used as cover to smuggle six Americans out of revolutionary Iran.
16 An insurance lawyer negotiates a Cold War prisoner swap nobody expected him to survive politically.
17 A retired intelligence officer is brought back to root out a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence.
18 A burned-out British agent's final mission may be a setup by his own side.
19 An advertising executive is mistaken for a spy and chased across the country by people trying to kill him.
20 A woman is recruited to spy on a Nazi circle in Brazil by infiltrating her own father's old associates.
21 The first Bond film sends 007 to Jamaica to investigate a disrupted rocket-launch program.
22 Bond investigates a gold magnate's plot to irradiate the entire U.S. gold reserve at Fort Knox.
23 Bond is lured into a Soviet honey-trap operation built entirely around stealing a decoding device.
24 James Bond's final mission pulls him out of retirement one last time.
25 Bond's loyalty to M is tested as a former agent returns for personal revenge.
26 A newly minted 007 takes on a financier of global terrorism in a high-stakes poker game.
27 A rogue agent may be the only one who can help Ethan Hunt expose a shadow organization.
28 A botched arms deal forces Ethan Hunt's team into their most dangerous mission yet.
29 An amnesiac trained killer tries to piece together who he used to work for.
30 Bourne's search for his own erased identity finally leads him back to where it all started.
31 A framed Jason Bourne is pulled back into the very agency that trained him to disappear.
32 A framed agent has to clear his name while exposing the real mole inside his own team.
33 A secret-agent husband's double life is exposed to his own unsuspecting wife.
34 A lawyer is targeted by rogue NSA agents after unknowingly receiving evidence of a murder.
35 A retiring CIA officer works to secretly extract his former protégé from a foreign prison.
36 A Cold War spy thriller played with more style than seriousness.
37 A street kid is recruited into a secret, impeccably dressed spy organization.
38 An extreme-sports rebel is recruited into government espionage as an unconventional asset.
39 A CIA officer accused of being a Russian sleeper agent goes on the run to prove her innocence.
40 James Bond confronts a former agent turned rogue after the fall of the Soviet Union.
41 Spy-parody silliness that spawned a whole catchphrase economy.
42 A Jewish singer joins the Dutch resistance and infiltrates the Nazi command from the inside.
43 A pulp novelist investigates his old friend's suspicious death in postwar Vienna.
44 A bandit and a demolitions expert are pulled into the Mexican Revolution against their better judgment.
45 A team of operatives is assembled to retrieve a dangerously incriminating diplomatic letter.
46 A misplaced CD of memoirs spirals into a Coen brothers espionage farce.
47 A disgraced British agent recruits a tailor to fabricate intelligence about a Panamanian coup.
48 A hapless, accidentally promoted secret agent bumbles his way through an actual conspiracy.
49 A deskbound CIA analyst is finally sent into the field when her handler's cover is blown.
50 The Kingsman agency teams up with its American counterpart after a devastating attack.
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