Special Report

Best Movies Set During the Cold War

The Cold War, the nearly 50-year ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, produced subterfuge, espionage, and proxy wars, but thankfully it did not lead to World War III. It also was fodder for a number of movies attempting to capture the tension of the era.

To determine the best movies set during the Cold War, 24/7 Tempo developed an index of movies using average ratings on IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, as of Dec. 15, 2022, weighting all ratings equally. (Documentaries were not considered.) Directorial and cast credits are from IMDb.

Cold War-themed movies brought filmgoers into the shadowy world of spies, defectors, double agents, microfilm, coup attempts, and moles – and overhanging it all was the fear of a nuclear holocaust. (These are the 30 best spy films of all time.)

Most of the films on the list are based on novels, and any discussion of Cold War cinema must include John le Carré. Three of his novels that became movies are on the list: “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and “The Russia House.”

Sean Connery’s movie career spanned the entirety of the Cold War period. He starred in three films on the list: “The Russia House,” the James Bond thriller “From Russia With Love,” and “The Hunt for Red October” – in which he played not a British spy but a Soviet submarine captain.

Many of the films take place or have extended scenes in Berlin – such as “Atomic Blonde,” “Torn Curtain,” “Bridge of Spies,” “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold,” and “Funeral in Berlin” – the frontline of the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Click here to see the best movies set during the Cold War

Those aforementioned movies were mostly cloak and dagger. Other films on our list, such as “Fail Safe,” “Thirteen Days,” and “The Bedford Incident,” brought the reality of the nuclear threat into stark relief. (See how close the human race came to ending life on earth every year since 1947.)

Among the films providing a more offbeat and sometimes humorous look at the era are “Matinee,” “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” and “Bananas.”

Courtesy of Pathé Entertainment

30. The Russia House (1990)
> IMDb user rating: 6.1/10 (15,521 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 50% (7,967 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 72% (18 reviews)
> Directed by: Fred Schepisi

Sean Connery plays a British book publisher who learns about a manuscript that outlines the Soviet Union’s anti-nuclear missile capabilities while visiting Moscow during the Cold War. He’s recruited by British intelligence and the CIA to investigate its editor, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. In the process, he falls in love with her and tries to protect her family. Also starring Roy Scheider and James Fox, this is one of the last thrillers made during the Cold War.

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Courtesy of Universal Pictures

29. Torn Curtain (1966)
> IMDb user rating: 6.6/10 (25,974 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 53% (9,141 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 67% (30 reviews)
> Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Director Alfred Hitchcock weighed in on the Cold War with this thriller. Paul Newman played an American physicist who stuns his family by defecting to East Germany. His fiancée (Julie Andrews) follows him behind the Iron Curtain and discovers he’s actually a double agent who’s trying to uncover Soviet nuclear secrets. When his cover is blown, the couple must make a perilous trip back to America.

Courtesy of Orion Pictures

28. Gorky Park (1983)
> IMDb user rating: 6.7/10 (13,529 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 60% (4,659 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 78% (27 reviews)
> Directed by: Michael Apted

William Hurt plays a Russian detective who investigates the murders of three people at Gorky Park, a Moscow amusement park. As he makes progress on the case, which is turning into an international political conspiracy, the KGB doesn’t seem interested in solving it. An American, played by Lee Marvin in one of his last major roles, offers leads, though he might be as dangerous as the KGB.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

27. Funeral in Berlin (1966)
> IMDb user rating: 6.8/10 (7,119 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 73% (1,000 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 67% (9 reviews)
> Directed by: Guy Hamilton

Following his success as Harry Palmer in “The Ipcress File,” Michael Caine returned as the wisecracking British spy in “Funeral in Berlin,” based on a Len Deighton novel – a film criticized for its slow, disjointed pace. This time he’s sent to East Berlin to collect a communist defector, disguising him as a corpse to get him through the Berlin Wall – but the situation is not what it appears to be.

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Courtesy of Focus Features

26. Atomic Blonde (2017)
> IMDb user rating: 6.7/10 (184,515 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 64% (34,758 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 79% (364 reviews)
> Directed by: David Leitch

Charlize Theron plays an undercover agent for the British secret service group M16 sent to Berlin during the latter stages of the Cold War to investigate the murder of a colleague and retrieve a list of double agents. As soon as she arrives, it’s become apparent she’s been set up. There’s plenty of martial arts action in this thriller, which also stars James McAvoy and John Goodman.

Courtesy of Orion Pictures

25. The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)
> IMDb user rating: 6.8/10 (11,248 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 69% (6,064 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 82% (22 reviews)
> Directed by: John Schlesinger

Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee were real-life boyhood friends from California who were arrested for espionage. Their story became a 1979 book and then this film. Boyce (Timothy Hutton) was a defense industry employee who became disillusioned with CIA interference in the internal affairs of other nations in the 1970s. He sought out Soviet contacts and sold top-secret U.S. satellite technology information to the Soviet Union. Lee (Sean Penn) was a drug dealer who used the opportunity to pass along information to the Soviet Union for financial gain.

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Courtesy of StudioCanal

24. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
> IMDb user rating: 7.0/10 (203,107 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 65% (50,000 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 84% (234 reviews)
> Directed by: Tomas Alfredson

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is the film version of the famed John Le Carré novel – a complicated story about betrayal in the ranks of the U.K.’s spies (there was also a 1979 BBC miniseries based on the book). The British secret service MI6 sends an agent (Mark Strong) to meet with a Hungarian general who knows the identity of a Soviet spy within the organization, but the general is assassinated before he can reveal the mole’s identity. Recently retired agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is called back to find the mole. The film also starred Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, and Stephen Graham.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures

23. Matinee (1993)
> IMDb user rating: 6.9/10 (10,464 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 62% (7,027 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 92% (36 reviews)
> Directed by: Joe Dante

Small-time movie producer Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) decides that the darkening mood of dread and fear surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis is the perfect time to release his schlocky sci-fi thriller “Mant” at a movie theater in Key West, Fla., the closest U.S. point to Cuba. Joe Dante’s film looks at the crises of teenagers who are going to the movie.

Courtesy of Miramax

22. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
> IMDb user rating: 7.0/10 (86,322 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 75% (58,874 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 79% (165 reviews)
> Directed by: George Clooney

“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” is the film adaptation of a memoir by game-show creator Chuck Barris (“The Dating Game,” “The Gong Show”), who in his other life was allegedly a hitman for the CIA. Sam Rockwell looks and acts very much like Barris. Clooney both directed the film and co-starred as Barris’s “handler.” The movie also featured Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore.

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Courtesy of Universal Pictures

21. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
> IMDb user rating: 7.0/10 (114,503 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 73% (226,468 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 82% (204 reviews)
> Directed by: Mike Nichols

Tom Hanks starred as the title character, a real-life U.S. congressman who, with disheveled CIA operative Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), helps support the Afghan resistance during the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 to 1989. Written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols, it earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Hoffman.

Courtesy of United Artists

20. Bananas (1971)
> IMDb user rating: 7.0/10 (35,044 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 74% (18,443 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 82% (34 reviews)
> Directed by: Woody Allen

One of Woody Allen’s early, zany comedic efforts featured Allen as Fielding Mellish, a nebbish from New York who tries to impress his social-activist girlfriend by joining resistance fighters in the fictional Latin American country of San Marcos. He eventually becomes the leader of the country and then is targeted by American intelligence, which accuses him of attempting to overthrow the U.S. government.

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Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

19. The Bedford Incident (1965)
> IMDb user rating: 7.4/10 (4,992 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 75% (1,250 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 85% (13 reviews)
> Directed by: James B. Harris

Richmark Widmark starred as the virulently anti-communist captain of the American ship USS Bedford, which is engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with a Soviet submersible in the North Atlantic Ocean off Greenland. His actions lead to catastrophic results. Sidney Poitier also starred, as a photojournalist onboard the ship.

Courtesy of New Line Cinema

18. Thirteen Days (2000)
> IMDb user rating: 7.3/10 (56,991 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 80% (30,172 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 83% (124 reviews)
> Directed by: Roger Donaldson

“Thirteen Days” refers to the timeframe of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The tension-filled film starring Kevin Costner captures the interplay among the main players in the Kennedy administration as they try to work with the Soviet Union to defuse the crisis, which put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Courtesy of MGM/UA Entertainment Company

17. WarGames (1983)
> IMDb user rating: 7.1/10 (94,915 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 76% (52,706 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 93% (44 reviews)
> Directed by: John Badham

One of the more inventive Cold War-themed films , “WarGames” starred Matthew Broderick as a student who accidentally hacks into a military supercomputer while searching for a video game. He creates a game titled Global Thermonuclear War that activates America’s nuclear arsenal in response to a simulated threat from the Soviet Union. Once he realizes there is a countdown to Armageddon, he enlists the help of his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy) to stop World War III.

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Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

16. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
> IMDb user rating: 7.6/10 (17,456 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 82% (5,000 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 89% (18 reviews)
> Directed by: Martin Ritt

Richard Burton embodied John le Carré‘s archetypical world-weary spy in this film, playing British agent Alec Leamas as he takes on one more assignment before he retires. He poses as a disgraced former MI5 agent in East Germany to get information about colleagues who’ve been captured. When he gets picked up, he discovers a web of intrigue unlike anything he’s seen in his career.

Courtesy of Warner Independent Pictures

15. Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
> IMDb user rating: 7.4/10 (96,071 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 83% (142,741 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 93% (226 reviews)
> Directed by: George Clooney

In the 1950s, as Sen. Joseph McCarthy seeks to expose communists in America, CBS News journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) focuses on revealing the lies and character-assassination tactics of McCarthy’s Senate investigation. While the CBS news team produces stories challenging the senator’s charges, they face pressure from the network’s sponsors to desist. The movie title is taken from Murrow’s signoff.

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Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

14. The Hunt for Red October (1990)
> IMDb user rating: 7.6/10 (188,284 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 88% (172,798 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 88% (73 reviews)
> Directed by: John McTiernan

“The Hunt for Red October,” adapted from Tom Clancy’s novel, is about a Soviet submarine commander (Sean Connery) who wants to defect to America. The sub, the Red October, is detected by the U.S. military but it is unclear to them what the sub’s intentions are. It’s up to CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) to find out and avoid a catastrophic confrontation.

Courtesy of United Artists

13. From Russia with Love (1963)
> IMDb user rating: 7.4/10 (125,534 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 84% (93,624 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 95% (60 reviews)
> Directed by: Terence Young

“From Russia with Love” is Sean Connery’s second appearance as James Bond. This time, 007 goes to Turkey, where he’s tasked with helping a beautiful Soviet consulate clerk (Daniela Bianchi) defect. In the meantime, the criminal organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E. is trying to kill Bond to avenge the death of Dr. No (the eponymous villain in the first Connery-Bond film).

Courtesy of Rank Film Distributors

12. The Ipcress File (1965)
> IMDb user rating: 7.2/10 (16,289 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 85% (5,000 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 97% (31 reviews)
> Directed by: Sidney J. Furie

Michael Caine became a major star in the 1960s, and “The Ipcress File” – based on a novel by Len Deighton – was one of his best movies of the period. Caine plays Harry Palmer, a wry-humored spy who’s investigating the kidnapping and brainwashing of British scientists. Palmer is unlike the era’s quintessential spy James Bond in that he lives modestly, wears glasses, and does his own cooking. A TV series loosely based on the film, came out this year.

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Courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

11. Bridge of Spies (2015)
> IMDb user rating: 7.6/10 (298,941 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 87% (65,587 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 90% (312 reviews)
> Directed by: Steven Spielberg

As Cold War tensions rise, a lawyer (Tom Hanks) is assigned to negotiate the release of Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union, in exchange for a convicted Soviet KGB spy (Mark Rylance). The critically acclaimed film is based on a true story. Co-written by the Coen Brothers, it earned Rylance a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Courtesy of United Artists

10. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
> IMDb user rating: 7.6/10 (19,637 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 84% (6,292 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 98% (43 reviews)
> Directed by: Robert Aldrich

Crime novelist Mickey Spillane co-wrote this twisting and turning film noir about detective Mike Hammer and his girlfriend, who become entangled in a dark plot involving torture of women and a scientist conducting deadly experiments that might involve nuclear energy. The movie’s climax was one of the most intriguing of the era.

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Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

9. Pickup on South Street (1953)
> IMDb user rating: 7.7/10 (13,750 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 89% (4,425 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 92% (36 reviews)
> Directed by: Samuel Fuller

Samuel Fuller’s film noir is about a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) in New York City who unknowingly snatches a woman’s wallet that contains a message intended for enemy agents. Soon, a communist spy ring targets him and uses the woman to find him and retrieve the message.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

8. Seven Days in May (1964)
> IMDb user rating: 7.9/10 (15,004 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 89% (3,065 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 91% (23 reviews)
> Directed by: John Frankenheimer

John Frankenheimer made his mark in the 1960s by directing films depicting Cold War tension, and “Seven Days in May” is one of his best efforts. Burt Lancaster played an American general leading a plot to overthrow a president (Frederic March) who supports a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Rod Serling of “Twilight Zone” fame wrote the riveting screenplay.

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

7. Fail Safe (1964)
> IMDb user rating: 8.0/10 (21,121 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 91% (7,162 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 93% (27 reviews)
> Directed by: Sidney Lumet

“Fail Safe” is about a technological glitch that sends American jets on a mission to drop nuclear bombs on Moscow, and the frantic, disturbingly realistic, attempts to recall the aircraft. Henry Fonda starred as the president who pleads with the pilots to call off their mission. The motion picture maintains unrelenting tension throughout its length.

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Courtesy of United Artists

6. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
> IMDb user rating: 7.9/10 (73,496 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 90% (31,403 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 97% (60 reviews)
> Directed by: John Frankenheimer

Fear of communist infiltration of the highest echelons of government manifested itself in “The Manchurian Candidate.” The film starred Frank Sinatra as a Korean War veteran trying to stop a U.S. serviceman, played by Laurence Harvey, who has been brainwashed by communists to assassinate a U.S. presidential nominee – an act that would lead to a takeover of the American government. The film was remade in 2004 starring Denzel Washington.

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

5. The Iron Giant (1999)
> IMDb user rating: 8.0/10 (180,630 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 90% (204,968 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 96% (142 reviews)
> Directed by: Brad Bird

A boy encounters and befriends a giant robot from outer space at the height of the Cold War in 1957 and tries to keep him away from a U.S. government agent who is bent on destroying the robot. The animated feature opens with a visual of the Soviet satellite Sputnik orbiting the Earth.

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Courtesy of Selznick Releasing Organization

4. The Third Man (1949)
> IMDb user rating: 8.1/10 (172,596 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 93% (50,000 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 99% (90 reviews)
> Directed by: Carol Reed

Post-war Vienna is divided into zones supervised by the victorious allies – the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France. Amid the destruction there is tension between East and West in the shadowy rubble of the city as American novelist Holly Martins (Josep Cotten) tries to track down an old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Wells), who’s taken advantage of the post-war chaos to sell black-market penicillin.

Courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

3. North by Northwest (1959)
> IMDb user rating: 8.3/10 (312,200 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 94% (79,896 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 97% (109 reviews)
> Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

“North by Northwest” is in the pantheon of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films. The movie is about an advertising executive (Cary Grant) who goes on the run because he’s mistaken for a government agent by foreign spies (led by James Mason) and also falsely accused of murder. Along the way, he falls in love with a woman (Eva Marie Saint) whose loyalties he begins to doubt. Among the film’s classic scenes is Cary Grant being chased by a biplane.

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

2. On the Waterfront (1954)
> IMDb user rating: 8.1/10 (148,492 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 95% (52,268 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 99% (105 reviews)
> Directed by: Elia Kazan

Marlon Brando plays a longshoreman who can no longer look the other way at the insidious influence organized crime has on the Hoboken docks. The movie launched Brando into cinema stardom. Director Elia Kazan, who was criticized for naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, tried to equate Brando’s testifying before a committee investigating criminal activity in the motion picture with naming names to HUAC.

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Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

1. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
> IMDb user rating: 8.4/10 (467,737 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 94% (209,644 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 98% (92 reviews)
> Directed by: Stanley Kubrick

This black comedy about nuclear armageddon featured Peter Sellers playing multiple roles, including a German-accented adviser (rumored to lampoon Henry Kissinger) to the president, also played by Sellers. The film came out prior to a non-satirical thriller with the same theme, “Fail Safe” (No. 7 on this list), which was released later in 1964.

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