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.

Trumbo depicts the 13-year struggle by the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) to break the blacklist imposed on him and the other members of the Hollywood Ten in 1947. By continuing to get his scripts produced throughout the Fifties, Trumbo made a heroic, if morally complex stand against rabid Red Scare-mongers like the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne (David James Elliott).

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. 

The story of the Soviet Union’s ice hockey team's pivotal role in relations with North America is fascinating. Its players were not just sportsmen. They were also in the army and integral to their home country's portrayal of itself on the world stage. Central to the Cold War battle of wills, the seemingly unbeatable team was a propaganda tool and, after perestroika, its members played for American and Canadian teams. Russia had infiltrated its adversaries. The Werner Herzog-produced documentary Red Army tells this tale.

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

There’s a screen quotation late in this remarkable documentary that reads, “An outstanding athlete cannot belong totally to himself.” The words are those of Soviet ice hockey trainer Anatoly Tarasov, who's one of the presences behind this story of the sport seen through the eyes and experience of the legendary defender Vyacheslav (Slava) Fetisov. But director Gabe Polsky has made a broader film, one which touches on the uncertain journey Russia has undergone over the last three decades.

There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the comforting bright colours and clean, supermarket-aisle lines blackened, singed and fragmented as if salvaged from some unimaginable disaster.

Where in the world will you find the most glittering line-up of international orchestras? The Proms? Salzburg? Lucerne? Edinburgh? Bucharest, actually. The Enescu Festival, which began on 30 August, this year boasts appearances by the Concertgebouw, Vienna Philharmonic, Dresden Staatskapelle, Israel Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St Petersburg Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra. And that’s leaving out the jewel in the crown, an appearance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle.

As its title might suggest, Christian Schwochow’s West (Westen) takes us back to the time of Germany divided. It's almost a chamber piece, catching the very particular experiences of a woman and her young son who leave East Berlin and end up in a refugee centre in the city’s American sector, where they’re forced to reappraise their expectations of what their new life in the West will be.

In Hope and Glory, John Boorman revisited the Blitz-battered London of his childhood, and managed to find infectious humour and optimism among the wreckage. Now, 28 years later, he travels back to the early Fifties for this belated sequel, depicting a Britain still exhausted from the European war while the conflict in Korea hinted at a different and scary new world.