An espionage film that is gripping for sure, but might not work for everyone.

Rating: 8/10 (19 September 2014)

An espionage film that is gripping for sure, but might not work for everyone.
Now, here is an espionage (spying) film that is based on the cold war spies of 1970's. Based on the novel of the same name by John Le Carre, this film has a great screenplay that I must say is great as a screenplay but it's very technical at the same time. This film begins with mole in the circus, now what is mole and what is circus here, to get that itself, I had to sit through the whole film and well, it was not such a pleasant revelation either.
Well, in this very film we have actors such as Colin Firth, Tom Hardy and the Sherlock guy Benedict Cumberbatch along with Gary Oldman at the helm. So we have got the best ensemble cast in recent years for a movie. About their performances, everyone does it with such rare understanding of their roles that even I as audience was astonished as to how was that emotion conveyed, when we have not known much of him yet.
The production design is awesome and so is the art direction, above all I liked the background music and the sound design, wow kudos to those guys, and cinematography was right in every place as the scenes are well composed. The performances keep you glued, the direction is great and the whole look is great I must say. Yet, there is something that is missing, there is something that is just not right, I can attribute that to editing as I do for other movies, but for this I can't say even that coz all those details are absolutely necessary to conclude the story. So the missing element is the story in itself, it's a story that's specific to an age, to an incident and it's not very universal either, Despite that, it's an intense brain exercise that may even make you watch multiple times just to understand it.
There is very little action, rather mostly words and dialogues that are tough to decipher. For me, I had no knowledge of such spies and this story and it came as a bouncer in the first viewing, I took the help of few links and then a second watch made me admire this. So for all the guys who are interested in the cold blooded, spy films this may be it, for others, they may of may not like it. This is a test for patience and fizzles out soon if one is not aware or admiring such stories. But if you know or even have a faint ide of what this film is about, you may fall in love with it. Now, thanks to wikipedia that helped me learn a good deal about this movie.
So, I can appreciate this movie yet I may not just recommend for everyone. So, a 4/5 for a good movie that's great in it's own way but needed a prologue and epilogue to help a layman understand.