***1/2

Rating: 9/10 (17 January 2017)

Someone will have to explain to me why Mark Rylance won the best supporting Oscar award for this very good film, especially in a year where Sylvester Stallone was well favored to garner the award.
That being said, this was a very good film showing the efforts of a Brooklyn lawyer in going to Europe to secure the swap of Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, a Russian spy with Gary Francis Powers, the latter getting caught during the U-2 Spy Incident during the waning years of the Eisenhower administration.
Hanks, as the attorney, is relentless that the swap must include the economics student who was studying in East Germany at the wrong time. The film showed the break that there was between East Germany and the Soviet Union.