Espionage

Citadel – Cold Plunge / Chinos

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Citadel – Cold Plunge / Chinos
  • IMDb: link | link

“Cold Plunge” and “Chinos” bring an end to our spies’ hiding starting with Abby’s (Ashleigh Cummings) foolish decision that puts her family in danger and gets her captured. We get a brawl between Mason Kane (Richard Madden) and Nadia (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) who now knows it was Mason who betrayed Citadel, and we get Bernard (Stanley Tucci) bringing the two spies together with his new CIA friends (Jack Reynor and Lina El Arabi) and Frank Sharpe (Matt Berry) to go on the offensive in a half-assed plan that goes off the rails almost immediately and leaves one of their own bleeding out on the floor of the CIA.

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Scarecrow and Mrs. King – Service Above and Beyond

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Scarecrow and Mrs. King – Service Above and Beyond
  • IMDb: link

Scarecrow Sunday takes us to 80s Washington, D.C. and the unusual partnership between a housewife and a spy. “Service Above and Beyond” offers a simple setup with Amanda (Kate Jackson) accompanying Lee (Bruce Boxleitner) to a party where important intelligence is to be passed on. When Amanda catches the attention of one of those under investigation, and makes up an outlandish backstory based on a romance novel she’s been reading, the Agency backstops the identity allowing her to distract the corrupt businessman (Paul Shenar) while Scarecrow looks into the unsavory Russian (Walter Gotell) he’s gotten into business with.

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Lust, Caution

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Lust, Caution
  • IMDb: link

One of my favorites from the extremely strong slate of films released in 2007, director Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution earned praise winning Lee his second Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival but also backlash for the film’s explicit sex scenes causing it to be released in America under a NC-17 rating. Loosely inspired by an attempt to kill a Japanese collaborator during WWII, Tang Wei stars as the most naive member of a group of radicalized college students who plan to kill a collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) set in power by the Japanese occupation in China.

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Citadel – Baked Alaskas

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Citadel – Baked Alaskas
  • IMDb: link

The original, and arguably weakest, of Amazon’s Citadel shows returns for a Second Season. We begin with narration from the still-captured Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci) which works as a recap of the show’s First Season (notably somewhat reconning the most important revelations from the season finale) and also sets up Bernard as a major character rather than just a supporting player. Following Bernard’s escape, the show also introduces dimwitted shoot-first former CIA Agent James Hutch (Jack Reynor) who is going to help Bernard stop Manticore from using mind-control technology that they forced him to invent, whether Bernard wants his help or not. He really doesn’t.

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Arabesque

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Arabesque
  • IMDb: link

Hitchcock-lite, director Stanley Donen‘s 1966 spy thriller Arabesque stars Gregory Peck as a college professor in over his head after being pulled into a world of intrigue involving an Egyptian cypher which killers, the government, and foreign officials all want translated. For a film that doesn’t do anything great, other than properly framing Sophia Loren as the film’s femme fatale whose true loyalties are always in question, Arabesque is only mildly diverting.

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