The thriller genre is remarkably flexible, lending itself to cover a wide range of themes and topics under all manner of styles and approaches. Some of the all-time greatest thrillers often flirt with other genres, whether it’s sci-fi in Children of Men, action in The French Connection, Western in No Country for Old Men, or even fantasy in The Northman. The genre also has numerous subgenres, from the talky and heady legal thrillers to the twisting and often off-putting psychological thrillers. Indeed, few cinematic genres are as versatile or ultimately rewarding as a well-crafted thriller.
Stories about spies have always held a special place in cinema. Who doesn’t love a daring, dangerous, and riveting tale of secrecy and high stakes, often with a complex political situation as the backdrop? Spy thrillers are highly regarded among cinephiles, with movies like Notorious and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy becoming outright institutions of the medium. However, many great entries into the subgenre have sadly been buried by the cinematic sands of time, whether because of the highly competitive landscape or because of their smaller, less bombastic nature. Forgotten as they may be, the spy thrillers on this list are genuinely perfect and deserve far more attention from mainstream audiences.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
‘Foreign Correspondent’ (1940)
Image via United Artists
It might seem unbelievable that an Alfred Hitchcock movie might be considered “underrated,” let alone “forgotten.” However, considering the director has such a rich and storied career, is it so hard to believe that some of his efforts might be less remembered and appreciated than others? Such is the case for the 1940 spy thriller Foreign Correspondent, starring Joel McCrea and Loraine Day. The plot centers on an American spy in Berlin, who tries to reveal a continent-wide conspiracy involving enemy spies in the days leading to the outbreak of World War II.
Foreign Correspondent is among Hitchcock’s best spy movies, so it’s a shame to see it so dismissed by most modern audiences. Alas, its legacy has been largely overshadowed by the director’s future masterpieces, from the aforementioned Notorious to the seminal North by Northwest. The film’s lack of star power also doesn’t help, with all due respect to McCrea and Day. Yet, Foreign Correspondent is just as twisting and assured as you would expect from a Hitchcock movie. It’s unexpectedly funny, ambitious, riveting, and refreshingly pulpy; indeed, it might be Hitchcock’s purest B-movie, deftly balancing genre thrills with a story that might not be particularly innovative, but is far more clever than it has any right to be. More than anything, Foreign Correspondent is enjoyable, a truly engrossing spy thriller that takes the best out of both genres to produce a gem of pure escapist joy. When it comes to spectacle, Hitchcock could do it like few others, and this undervalued triumph proves it.
‘The Ipcress File’ (1965)
Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in ‘The Ipcress File’Image via Film Rank Distributors
Some of you might be sneering at the concept of including a film as seminal as The Ipcress File in a list about forgotten gems. Yet, consider its current standing among audiences — for example, it has only 19k ratings on IMDb — and you’ll realize that many might not be aware of the 1960s classic. Michael Caine stars as Harry Palmer, an intelligence officer from the British War Office, who is investigating the mysterious disappearances of high-ranking scientists, who then randomly reappear, brainwashed and unaware of their kidnappings.
The Ipcress File changed the way the spy genre was perceived by becoming the ultimate “anti-James Bond” movie. Coming out just a few years after the equally pioneering Dr. No, the film revolutionized the depiction of spies in cinema, depriving the genre of all the sleek bravado, glamour, and world-ending stakes popularized by James Bond’s first cinematic outing. In their place, The Ipcress File offers nothing but bleak bureaucracy and humdrum paperwork; here, spies are made behind desks. Caine’s Harry Palmer is a working-class man making his way through a world of betrayal and secrecy, outsmarting the villains through street smarts and gritty commitment rather than with fancy gadgets or suave charm. The Ipcress File is a foundational entry in the spy genre, and more people should appreciate its significant contributions.
‘The Whistle Blower’ (1986)
Image via Rank Film Distributors
Michael Caine strikes again, this time over twenty years after The Ipcress File. Bright but naive Russian linguist Robert Jones (Nigel Havers) is found dead from an apparent suicide, but his father, retired British naval officer Frank (Caine), is unconvinced. As Frank investigates further, he stumbles upon a large and complicated web of deception tracing back to the highest levels of the government, with agents willing to do anything to preserve Britain’s foreign relations.
The Whistle Blower uses its setting and premise to delivera thrilling and paranoid Cold War thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The film exploits every trope in the Cold War subgenre to deliver a classic tale of desperation, mistrust, and one man’s fight against an entire institution. Like other films of the era, The Whistle Blower has little confidence in the shady organizations that are seemingly meant to protect the public, using an admittedly heavy dose of pulp to turn them into captivating, albeit slightly absurd, villains. However, the film stands out for its focus on the character’s psyche, especially the widower Frank, whose pursuit of vengeance is as much rooted in love for his son as it is in an overall disinchantment with a spy world he no longer recognizes.
‘No Way Out’ (1987)
Kevin Costner delivered many classics throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but among his most underappreciated efforts is the spy thriller No Way Out, co-starring Gene Hackman and Sean Young. Based on the 1946 Kenneth Fearing novel The Big Clock, the film follows Tom Farrell (Costner), a naval officer who enters into an affair with Susan Atwell (Young), the mistress of Secretary of Defence David Brice (Hackman). When Atwell turns up dead, Farrell is put in charge of an increasingly complicated investigation that will see him become a suspect once the nature of their relationship becomes public knowledge.
No Way Out is the spy thriller subgenre at its purest and most engaging. It offers a messy and incredibly labyrinthine narrative that is engrossing without ever becoming too complex to understand. At its center is a great Costner as the unwitting investigator, whose personal life will turn him into a murder suspect in the very case he is in charge of. For his part, Hackman does what he did best: stealing scenes and playing a deceitful character who knows far more than he lets on. Suspenseful and with a twist that ranks among the best in the ’80s, No Way Out turns Washington into a maze of lies, passions, and crime that will make the average comings and goings of the city’s politicians look like child’s play.
‘Black Bag’ (2025)
Cate Blanchett with a badge by her mouth in ‘Black Bag’ (2025)Image via Focus Features
It might seem ridiculous to include a movie released barely a year ago in a list about “forgotten” thrillers. However, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say Black Bag was forgotten from the get-go, grossing only $43 million worldwide and barely making a dent in pop culture. Not even Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh and A-listers like Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender could save this movie from oblivion, which is a true shame since it is a rather great spy thriller, confident and stylish, featuring one of Blanchett’s best performances this decade.
The premise centers on George Woodhouse (Fassbender), a British Intelligence officer who is assigned to investigate a list of potential traitors within the organization. The problem? One of those names belongs to his wife, Kathryn (Blanchett). The premise is full of potential, and Soderbergh more than delivers. Black Bag is fun, sleek, thrilling, and sexy, greatly benefiting from the playful yet electric chemistry between Fassbender and Blanchett. It might not reinvent the wheel when it comes to the spy thriller formula, but it doesn’t have to; that said, it does offer a refreshing take on its main thematic concerns, mainly loyalty, trust, and marriage. Here, Soderbergh settles for delivering an energetic and witty adventure that feels like a throwback to the spy capers that first made the genre successful.
