Gary Oldman gives us a Smiley to equal Alec Guinness's in this triumphant adaptation of John le Carré's masterpiece

Directed by Tomas Alfredson, who made the subtly suggestive Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, and adapted by the British husband and wife team, Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O'Connor, this is as lucid and accomplished a screen version of a long, complicated novel as I have seen. John le Carré is still best known for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, his realistic 1963 riposte to the then burgeoning cult of James Bond, the title of which immediately entered the language alongside Graham Greene's The Third Man and Our Man in Havana.

But the book that changed the course of espionage fiction came 11 years later. Following his single excursion into conventional psychological fiction (The Naive and Sentimental Lover), le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,...