The big surprise of this new-season opener of Homeland was that black ops specialist Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) didn't die at the end of series 5 after all, despite the fact that we last saw him apparently moribund in his hospital bed, having penned a poignant adieu to sometime paramour Carrie Mathison. But, after surviving a hefty dose of sarin gas, he isn't the man she used to know.

As an old Sixties lefty brought up on paranoia-infused thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American conspiracies. However, in contrast to his earlier labyrinthine epics Nixon and JFK, this account of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden keeps clutter to a minimum as Stone fashions a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.

It's no great surprise to find that Stone portrays Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of America's intelligence agencies, and if you happen to work for the CIA you'll hate this movie, but Stone makes Snowden's journey towards his fateful decision to spill the top-secret beans plausible and persuasive. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Snowden (many of whose family were federal lawyers or in the US military) starts out as a sincere young patriot, training for Special Forces but rejected as not physically strong enough to make the cut (pictured below). A computer genius who's keen to serve his country, he joins the CIA instead and whizzes through the admission tests with astounding ease.

However, as he's given various postings around the world, he becomes disillusioned at how the CIA and National Security Agency are abusing their seemingly unlimited powers. He's shocked at the way Timothy Olyphant's Geneva-based CIA operative cynically compromises a contact and blackmails him into becoming an informant, then later is horrified by the way a programme he helped create, EpicShelter, is being used for marking targets for extermination in drone attacks.

The sheer extent of what the Americans were, or are, up to remains flabbergasting, with the NSA supposedly capable of tracking every mobile phone on the planet, though it's supposedly all justifiable in the name of national self-defence. They're trying to "find the terrorist in the internet haystack", as Snowden's CIA trainer Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage) puts it.

"You didn't tell me we were running a dragnet on the whole world," Snowden protests to his boss Corbin O'Brian (Rhys Ifans), who likes to point out that "the front line is everywhere". For the the O'Brian role, Ifans (pictured below) has assumed a gravelly baritone loaded with menace, and seems to be channelling Jason Robards and Scott Glenn as he looms ominously from the screen in giant close-ups. 

Stone isn't known for his light romantic touch, but he handles Snowden's complicated relationship with girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) deftly, and the way that Agency suspicions about Snowden's attitude to his work start to cast paranoid shadows over the couple's private life effectively personalises the broader picture. Indeed, the degree of intrusion which intelligence operatives are subjected to by their employers is a fascinating aspect of the tale.

Scenes of Snowden hiding out in Hong Kong while Guardian journalists prepare to publish his reams of top-secret revelations tend towards melodrama (Tom Wilkinson seems to share only the most only tenuous of connections with defence correspondent Ewan MacAskill, while Joely Richardson makes an unfeasibly actressy hash of Janine Gibson, editor of Guardian USA). Melissa Leo's portrayal of Laura Poitras (who made the Snowden documentary Citizenfour to which Stone's movie is quite heavily indebted) is marred by the malevolent creepiness Leo brings to every role.

However, Gordon-Levitt is pitch perfect in the title role, gradually revealing the steely inner core behind his nerd-like exterior, and skilfully evoking Snowden's process of disillusionment as he sees more and more of the skull beneath the skin of his homeland. Overall, this is a much better film than Stone's recent history might have led you to anticipate.

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@SweetingAdam

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Snowden

As an old Sixties lefty brought up on thrillers like The Parallax View, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American political conspiracies, and inevitably he portrays CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of America's intelligence agencies. If you work for the CIA you'll hate Snowden (★★★★), but Stone has fashioned the story into a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.

If one was going to write the recipe for a classic British children’s film, it would probably include the following: adapt much-loved novel; hire fresh-faced young actors and well-worn comedians; budget for steam trains chugging over viaducts; ensure messing around in boats; add lashings of pop and sprinkle with a faint whiff of jeopardy.

Based on an abortive real-life attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1894, Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent has sometimes been held up as a harbinger of the kind of terrorist attacks the world has been subjected to by the likes of Baader-Meinhof, Al Qaeda and Isis. Doubtless this was part of the BBC's motivation for making this new three-part dramatisation.

John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.

This Paris-set thriller was one of several films which had its release date postponed in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the French capital last November, giving the impression that it might be shockingly violent or provocatively political. In fact, it's a slightly uneasy mix of caper, buddy-movie and spy adventure, as its protagonists battle a high-level conspiracy involving the mother of all bank robberies.

Spying is not what it used to be. Old-schoolers beat the baddie, beat the house at roulette and then beat someone to death without even creasing their shirt. Today’s spy seems ill-equipped. Take Ryan Reynolds’s Bill Pope. We know he’s in the CIA because he’s dodging around the City of London looking conspicuous. Anarchist hacker Heimbahl (Jordi Molla) easily hookwinks and kills him.

Martin Rauch-stroke-Moritz Stamm, the reluctant spy who by the end of the final, double episode of this eight-parter had achieved more than most in that profession, managed the ultimate last night: he came in from the cold. In a series whose refrain could almost have been “You can’t go home again”, there he was back at the domestic hearth as if nothing had happened (except that his mother Ingrid was healed). Idyllic ending? The irony heavy in the air, of course, was that five years or so later the home he had come back to – East Germany – would itself cease to exist.

A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West End premiere that I recall almost three decades on.