The story of the notorious MI6 agent and Soviet spy Kim Philby has been told before, but A Spy Among Friends (ITVX) has “a fresh bash at it”, with mixed results, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. Adapted from the 2015 book by Ben Macintyre, the drama opens with the “big reveal” that Philby (Guy Pearce) has been feeding intel to the KGB for the past 20 years. His close friend and fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) is despatched to Beirut to retrieve Philby and extract a confession; at which point the drama becomes “a sort of espionage stew”, hopping between times and locations in a way that isn’t entirely satisfactory.
The drama has all the “atmosphere, period detail and clipped dialogue” you could hope for, said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard; but the script is rather clunky, with some points laid on with a trowel. There are “heavy hints”, for instance, that Elliott is secretly besotted with Philby – which has the unfortunate effect of plastering “another layer of repression” onto Lewis’s “already buttoned-up performance”; and Anna Maxwell Martin does little to brighten proceedings as a “relentlessly stony” fictional character.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
6 homes for entertainingFeature Featuring a heated greenhouse in Pennsylvania and a glamorous oasis in California
-
Obesity drugs: Will Trump’s plan lower costs?Feature Even $149 a month, the advertised price for a starting dose of a still-in-development GLP-1 pill on TrumpRx, will be too big a burden for the many Americans ‘struggling to afford groceries’
-
The ‘Kavanaugh stop’Feature Activists say a Supreme Court ruling has given federal agents a green light to racially profile Latinos
-
6 homes for entertaining
Feature Featuring a heated greenhouse in Pennsylvania and a glamorous oasis in California
-
Film reviews: ‘Jay Kelly’ and ‘Sentimental Value’Feature A movie star looks back on his flawed life and another difficult dad seeks to make amends
-
6 homes on the Gulf CoastFeature Featuring an elegant townhouse in New Orleans’ French Quarter and contemporary coastal retreat in Texas
-
The vast horizons of the Puna de AtacamaThe Week Recommends The ‘dramatic and surreal’ landscape features volcanoes, fumaroles and salt flats
-
The John Lewis ad: touching, or just weird?Talking Point This year’s festive offering is full of 1990s nostalgia – but are hedonistic raves really the spirit of Christmas?
-
Train Dreams pulses with ‘awards season gravitas’The Week Recommends Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton star in this meditative period piece about a working man in a vanished America
-
Middleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’The Week Recommends The Rest is Politics co-host compiles his fortnightly columns written during his time as an MP
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
