Konterr Brilliant and touching

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Mabel Munoz Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Gerhard Stoltz I had some previous knowledge of the Farewell-affair, so i came in knowing pretty much what to expect. On the whole they seemed to pull it off pretty well. The one thing that did grate me though were the scenes with Ronald Reagan in them. The acting and dialogue in those are way under par for the movie and seriously impacted my enjoyment of the rest of it.But yeah. If you want the reverse Snowden then this is the movie for you. The pacing is all right. It is not horribly complicated, as far as spy thrillers go.A tense dropoff here, an escape here, some exposition of character motivation, some family drama, a whiff of secrecy and an outcome which is never in doubt.

sergepesic What a brilliant movie. Spies, lies,twisted mind games. No explosions, no bullets, no exciting background music, no old hat tricks. Inspite of that, or better, because of that, tense, suspenseful and original movie. Real spies are not superheroes, flying through the air, ducking hundreds of bullets, overpowering dozens of villains with their martial arts skills unparalleled in the universe. Most of the time they happen to be, timid or coerced or dedicated to a cause. Their job is not glamorous, they scurry like rats in a dark alley, they sweat and smell,sometimes they live, most of the time they die. Finally the real spy movie, deep and harsh, leaving the sickening feeling. As usual the decent, courageous people get shoved aside or get killed for a higher cause- saving some ambitious creep's ass.

Andres Salama A good if a bit talky spy thriller from France that fictionalizes the real case of Vladimir Vetrov, a high ranking spy from the KGB who in the early 1980s and under the code name Farewell gave to the DST, the French internal security service, a massive dossier of files that showed how the Soviets were stealing massively Western technology. The French decided to pass the files to the United States, a convenient thing to do since the Reagan Administration was very suspicious of president François Mitterrand having several communist ministers in his cabinet (Fred Ward has a funny cameo in the movie as Ronald Reagan; Willem Dafoe appears as the CIA director).In the movie Vetrov is called Grigoriev and is played by the famous Serbian director Emir Kusturica. For dramatic reasons, the importance of these files is exaggerated in the movie; they are said to include all sort of things, even diplomatic codes which they did not and the dossier is somehow connected with the decision to announce the Star Wars weapons program. In the film, and since embassy personnel was under surveillance from the KGB, the DST decides to use as a contact with Grigoriev a French engineer working in Moscow for the Thomson firm (who is played by Guillaume Canet as a nervous Woody Allen type guy; Alexandra Maria Lara plays his wife who is obviously shocked when she learns her nerdy husband moonlights as a spy).Directed by Christian Carion, who made the very good World War I drama Joyeux Noel the film is especially fine in the reconstruction of the early 1980s and especially the Soviet Union at the time (Moscow is shown here as surprisingly sunny; if a movie based on this case have been made during the Cold War, Moscow would have looked surely much more gloomy and sinister). A good effort.

liberalgems This is a very empowering, true-story about one man, Sergei Gregoriev, who probably did more to bring down the Communist government in Russia - and end the cold war - than any other person who ever lived! This man should be honored by a postage stamp in every Western country in the world and in every high school history textbook! What an incredibly brave human being!I gained a lot of insights from watching this amazing film. The Russians lost an estimated 26 million people during World War 2. That's 1 in 3 people that died in all of World War 2 did so within the borders of the Soviet Union! I can only imagine the trauma and paranoia that was inflicted on the survivors who later then came to power. It didn't help either that a monster was at the head of government (Stalin) from 1924 to 1953. And, you wonder why the Soviets had a such a mind-boggling intelligence apparatus established throughout the United States? Once this network of spies was dismantled, the Soviet leadership was blind! Out of fear they bankrupted themselves on military spending because they could no longer accurately assess what actual threats the United States posed to them!Sergei Gregoriev, knew how his government would react to such a threat and he sacrificed everything to make it happen. I don't think he would be happy with the gangster capitalism that took Communism's place. But at least there are no more brutal wars fought in desperately poor countries, which have cost millions of lives because of the Cold War! Future generations will thank you for your sacrifice, Sergei Gregoriev!