Breach

The plot of this bracingly grown-up thriller is taken from recent history. In 2001, the FBI unmasked Robert Hanssen, one of the Bureau's own counter-intelligence specialists, as a KGB mole. The man who uncovered this spymaster's 15-year-plus deception was fresh-faced Eric O'Neill (played with suitable rigidity by Ryan Phillippe), a lowly agent-in-training who was used as the bait in a complicated sting operation. Sticking closely to the facts of the case, co-writer/director Billy Ray's take on "the worst breach in the history of the FBI" plays out as a suspenseful and cerebral game of human chess. Chris Cooper (an Oscar winner for Adaptation.) excels as the enigmatic Hanssen: a staunch Catholic with aweakness for pornography. Like Ray's debut Shattered Glass (the story of a duplicitous journalist who invented his own sources), it's a riveting human drama about the lies men tell and the personal cost of straying so far from the truth.