Big Brother could well be watching you, according to Steven Spielberg

Directed by three-time Academy Award®-winning director Steven Spielberg, “Bridge of Spies” stars: two-time Academy Award victor Tom Hanks as James Donovan; three-time Tony Award® victor Mark Rylance as Rudolf Abel, a KGB agent defended by Donovan; Scott Shepherd as Central Intelligence Agency operative Hoffman; Academy Award nominee Amy Ryan as James’ wife, Mary; Sebastian Koch as East German lawyer Vogel; and Academy Award nominee Alan Alda as Thomas Watters, a partner at Donovan’s law firm.

Your correspondent spent much of the first two acts of Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies – which premiered over the weekend at the New York Film Festival – trying to tune in to the picture’s particular wavelength.

Set in 1957, “Bridge of Spies” evokes the era as one of mounting thermonuclear hysteria and alarming group-think, in which a lawyer who advocates for a Soviet agent can be seen as a traitor to his own country (potentially worse than Abel, who wasn’t American to begin with).

The film starts compellingly, Abel (whose gentle Scottish accent is never properly explained) mixing his clandestine activities with a mundane existence as an artist. By association, Donovan is reviled too, the more so when he protests that the hallowed American justice system is failing his client.

It’s not that the subject matter is particularly Hawksian – and, in one great scene especially, Spielberg goes all in on the spy movie milieu, enjoying the tactile pleasures of the rain, the overcoats, the fedoras, the umbrellas.

Donovan’s story was not widely known until the British playwright Matt Charman became fascinated by it and took it to Spielberg.

The story of Powers, whose U2 spy-plane was shot down in 1960, is less adroitly handled, sometimes seeming as if it is crammed in purely to nudge the narrative along. Failing that, he’d done one better and cast honorary Boy Scout and all-around good guy Tom Hanks in the role, transforming a potential indictment of patriotic hypocrisy and Cold War subterfuge into a riveting, feel-good time for the whole family (two instances of the “F-word” notwithstanding), putting it on track to top “War Horse“.

It’s a cracking tale, and very largely true, though I wish Spielberg had resisted one or two bursts of heavy-handed imagery comparing freedom-loving America with oppressed Eastern Europe.

Bridge of Spies opens on October 16 in the U.S. and November 27 in the UK.

Based on historical events that happened during the Cold War era when an American U-2 spy jet was shot down in Soviet air space along with its pilot, the stirring thriller “Bridge of Spies” brings to life the crisis that raised tensions between the USA and the Soviets during such volatile times.