Well, they're saying this was the final episode, but these days you never know how long TV's ratings-hungry marketeers might eke a successful show out for. London Spy 2 would be a major ask, considering how this series somehow spun a bare minimum of content (even though it was shrouded in oodles of atmosphere) out to five episodes. Still, the ending didn't really end, so watch this space. 

Nostalgia for the good old days of mutually assured destruction? You’d have got long odds on such a thing on 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was breached. A quarter of a century on, the Americans and the Russians are entangled in a whole other theatre of war in which the idea of negotiating with the enemy is unthinkable. The Soviets may have been abominable commie bastards but, hey, our guys could still clink a glass with them. So Steven Spielberg is able to visit the Cold War in something like a spirit of levity.

Bridge of Spies is much more overtly an entertainment than Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. It’s also an unapologetic defence of American exceptionalism, as embodied in Tom Hanks, an actor who has inherited Jimmy Stewart’s ability to project intelligence matched by integrity. He plays James B. Donovan, a wily insurance lawyer who once upon a time was a prosecutor at Nuremberg. When a Soviet spy called Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is hunted down in Brooklyn, he must be given an American version of a show trial: one in which the wheels of justice are seen to turn, and the accused is given a proper defence. Step forward, Donovan, reluctantly anticipating opprobrium and trouble for his suburban nuclear family of three kids and delectable wife (Amy Ryan, pictured below).

The complication is the CIA and the legislature don’t want Abel to get off the hook. Donovan's instinct, over which he has no control, is to give them a working lesson in the meaning of the constitution (see clip overleaf). Even Abel warns Donovan to go carefully. His advocacy works up to a point. Abel is spared execution, Donovan pleading that he may be useful as a bargaining chip when America wants to retrieve one of her own. Sure enough, a pilot on a top-secret high-altitude mission over Soviet space is promptly shot down in his U2 spy plane and fails to inject himself with poison to avoid falling into enemy hands. Donovan is sent to Berlin as a private individual to negotiate an exchange. Donovan being Donovan, and Spielberg enjoying a tilt against the odds, he tries to get two for one: the pilot, plus an American student caught on the wrong side the day the wall was erected.

This spin down memory lane, a great deal of it more or less based on fact, is the brainchild of Matt Charman, promoted to nosebleed territory from writing scripts for British television about family zoos and police skulduggery. He shares his credit with Joel and Ethan Coen and between them they have cooked up an intensely gripping thriller. The Coens, you suspect, were responsible for tugging the geopolitical face-off towards gentle caricature. The senior KGB encountered on the front line in East Berlin are saturnine but robustly comic, while much fun is had twitting the frustrated pawns representing the DDR. The boot is on the other foot for Sebastian Koch, more spied upon than spying in The Lives of Others but here playing East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel.

As for the look of the film, America is all polished wood and purring motors, while the spirit of Deighton and Le Carré is invoked in the grim greyness of Berlin on both sides (until we penetrate the Soviets’ plush embassy, that is). Spielberg does what only he can with a camera. He zooms shamelessly in to flag up psychological dilemma. For the moment the spy plane crashes, the clatter of plunging metal evokes that coach dangling over a cliff in Jurassic Park. The denouement is second only to ET for outright emotionalism. If the film has a flaw, it’s that the stories of the two captured Americans go for next to nothing, especially that of Francis Gary Powers, the pilot who was widely condemned for allowing himself to be captured.

The film’s headlining novelty is Mark Rylance, who plays Abel with a vaguely Scottish accent as a poker-faced innocent with quite as much time to think and stare as Thomas Cromwell. He even gets a catchphrase. “Would it help?” he asks when Donovan wonders why he doesn’t look worried (see clip overleaf). Like the early scene in which he extracts a secret message from a tiny contraption (pictured above), the performance is mesmerising in its pernickety attention to detail. His scenes with Hanks are the riveting heart of this compelling - if not always plausible - comic-book history lesson.

Bridge of Spies really is the spy game as just that: a game whose horrors Spielberg has thrillingly sanitised.

MARK RYLANCE’S BIGGEST HITS ON STAGE AND SCREEN

Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance

Endgame. In Complicite's homage to Beckett, Rylance's Hamm is an animated, self-lacerating lout

Farinelli and the King. A witty and moving new play is a timely reminder of just why art matters

Jerusalem. Rylance is unforgettable as Johnny Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s smash Royal Court hit

The BFG. Rylance lends moments of the sublime to standard issue Spielberg

La Bête. Rylance dazzles in astonishing opening monologue, but this callow play coasts on the performances

Nice Fish. Rylance is waiting for cod-ot in this absurdist West End trifle

Twelfth Night/Richard III. Rylance doubles up as Olivia and the hunchbacked king for Shakespeare's Globe

Wolf Hall. Rylance works rare marvels as Hilary Mantel's scheming Tudor fixer

PLUS ONE TURKEY

Much Ado About Nothing. Rylance's Old Vic staging of Shakespeare's romantic comedy with elderly leads gets lost in translation

TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)

A Hologram for the King. Tom Hanks is the reason to see Dave Eggers's sentimental Saudi comedy

Captain Phillips. Piracy drama prompts bravura all-action display from director Paul Greengrass and captain Hanks

Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic

Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson as PL Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney track the journey of Mary Poppins from page to screen

Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism

Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission

PLUS ONE TURKEY

Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie

Overleaf: watch clips from Bridge of Spies

The repercussions of the revelations about intelligence gathering by American and other surveillance services made by US whistleblower Edward Snowden have proved huge. Laura Poitras’s documentary CitizenFour is no less revelatory about the process of their appearance, about just how Snowden came to be in that Hong Kong hotel room with reporter Glenn Greenwald, and what happened there.

The TV series on which Guy Ritchie has based his new spy-buddies movie first appeared on the small screen (in black and white) in 1964, when Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin welcomed us into their secret lair in New York and introduced themselves as "enforcement agents" for U.N.C.L.E., apparently a sort of UN/CIA hybrid. The grandfatherly Mr Alexander Waverly, resembling a retired bank manager in venerable tweed, announced himself as their boss.

The idea of a movie spin-off from BBC One's spy show Spooks has been lurking with intent ever since the tenth and final series ended in 2011. Finally it's here, helmed by director Bharat Nalluri (who shot the first and last episodes for TV) and with Peter Firth's Sir Harry Pearce at its centre. Where, as the Spookfather-in-chief, he had to be.

During its 10-season run on BBC One between May 2002 and October 2011, Spooks built a lasting reputation as a superior espionage thriller, charting the battle of a squad of MI5 agents to protect the realm against its fiendish and unscrupulous adversaries. Despite the inevitable plot-holes and sometimes incredible storylines, Spooks managed to keep itself anchored in the bleak realities of intelligence work, where it was wise to trust nobody and if you were paranoid, that's because the bad guys really were out to get you.

Rum old business, espionage – at least in the way we Brits are still pursuing it. For all the reality that the existential threat has long moved locations, in its television incarnations we remain addicted to the Cold War, the attraction to those gloomy postwar years seemingly a fatal one. The BBC’s new spy drama The Game was back in prime le Carré territory and the early Seventies, with industrial unrest and power cuts further turning down the visual wattage.

“The righteous traitor” must be as provocative a subtitle as any when the subject is espionage. Director George Carey nevertheless used it in this highly revealing film about George Blake, the “spy who got away”, which proved as much about the anatomy of treachery – its correlation with the uneasy relationship of the outsider to a dominant establishment – as it was an investigation of the intelligence world in which Blake played so notable a role.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the saying goes – and Kingsman: The Secret Service is a cracking part-homage, part-pastiche of the James Bond franchise (and other British spy movies) done with knowing comedy, élan and obvious affection. It's based on The Secret Service comic book created by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar, and is directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class), and here he reunites with Jane Goldman, who also provided scripts for his previous works.

No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.