Every spy thriller movie streaming on Criterion Channel in the US right now — 20 films ranked by rating, checked against Criterion Channel’s live catalog.
Updated July 2026 · Availability refreshed from Criterion Channel US
Directed by Guy Hamilton
✦ MovieMuse AI takeEstablishes the gadget-driven spy formula with Goldfinger's Fort Knox heist—turning espionage into elaborate, imaginative spectacle.
Special agent 007 comes face to face with one of the most notorious villains of all time, and now he must outwit and outgun the powerful tycoon to prevent him from cashing in on a devious scheme to raid Fort Knox -- and obliterate the world's economy.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHitchcock's train compartment becomes a pressure cooker of suspicion where the vanishing itself becomes the McGuffin that forces ordinary travelers into espionage.
On a train headed for England a group of travelers is delayed by an avalanche. Holed up in a hotel in a fictional European country, young Iris befriends elderly Miss Froy. When the train resumes, Iris suffers a bout of unconsciousness and wakes to find the old woman has disappeared. The other passengers ominously deny Miss Froy ever existed, so Iris begins to investigate with another traveler and, as the pair sleuth, romantic sparks fly.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHitchcock's genius lies in the innocent-man-on-the-run template—establishing spy thriller's greatest structural device.
Richard Hanney has a rude awakening when a glamorous female spy falls into his bed - with a knife in her back. Having a bit of trouble explaining it all to Scotland Yard, he heads for the hills of Scotland to try to clear his name by locating the spy ring known as The 39 Steps.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
✦ MovieMuse AI takeFotograf-turned-correspondent stumbles through assassination and conspiracy with urgent realism, predating spy fiction's glamorization with messy, improvisational tradecraft.
American crime reporter John Jones is reassigned to Europe as a foreign correspondent to cover the imminent war. When he walks into the middle of an assassination and stumbles on a spy ring, he seeks help from a beautiful politician’s daughter and an urbane English journalist to uncover the truth.
Directed by Terence Young
✦ MovieMuse AI takePioneered spy thriller's seduction-as-weapon tradecraft with Rosa Klebb, making eroticism central to Cold War tension.
Agent 007 is back in the second installment of the James Bond series, this time battling a secret crime organization known as SPECTRE. Russians Rosa Klebb and Kronsteen are out to snatch a decoding device known as the Lektor, using the ravishing Tatiana to lure Bond into helping them. Bond willingly travels to meet Tatiana in Istanbul, where he must rely on his wits to escape with his life in a series of deadly encounters with the enemy.
Directed by Harold Young
✦ MovieMuse AI takeDouble-life premise perfected here—the foppish aristocrat mask conceals revolutionary action, establishing the psychological tension that defines modern spy narratives.
18th century English aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney leads a double life. He appears to be merely the effete aristocrat, but in reality is part of an underground effort to free French nobles from Robespierre's Reign of Terror.
Directed by Terence Young
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBond's Jamaica infiltration launched the template: suave operative, exotic location, scientific villain, and the gadget as narrative device that all spies still follow.
Agent 007 battles mysterious Dr. No, a scientific genius bent on destroying the U.S. space program. As the countdown to disaster begins, Bond must go to Jamaica, where he encounters beautiful Honey Ryder, to confront a megalomaniacal villain in his massive island headquarters.
Directed by Roger Donaldson
✦ MovieMuse AI takePentagon-set thriller exploits Cold War paranoia through a murder that implicates everyone, making every character simultaneously suspect and potential ally.
Navy Lt. Tom Farrell meets a young woman, Susan Atwell , and they share a passionate fling. Farrell then finds out that his superior, Defense Secretary David Brice, is also romantically involved with Atwell. When the young woman turns up dead, Farrell is put in charge of the murder investigation. He begins to uncover shocking clues about the case, but when details of his encounter with Susan surface, he becomes a suspect as well.
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGodard's photojournalist reluctantly embedded in Geneva's shadows examines how ideology and personal conviction fracture under clandestine pressure.
Despite his lack of political convictions, photojournalist Bruno Forestier is roped into a paramilitary group waging a shadow war in Geneva against the Algerian independence movement.
Directed by Ronald Neame
✦ MovieMuse AI takeRetired operative weaponizes his memoir against the agency itself—the ultimate betrayal fantasy where classified knowledge becomes the spy's final leverage.
When CIA operative Miles Kendig deliberately lets KGB agent Yaskov get away, his boss threatens to retire him. Kendig beats him to it, however, destroying his own records and traveling to Austria where he begins work on a memoir that will expose all his former agency's covert practices. The CIA catches wind of the book and sends other agents after him, initiating a frenetic game of cat and mouse that spans the globe.
Directed by Ringo Lam Ling-Tung
✦ MovieMuse AI takeUndercover Hong Kong cop fractures psychologically between two masters, anticipating modern thrillers' obsession with the mole's fragmented loyalty.
Ko Chow is an undercover cop who is under pressure from all sides. His boss, Inspector Lau, wants him to infiltrate a gang of ruthless jewel thieves; his girlfriend wants him to commit to marriage or she will leave Hong Kong with another lover; and he is being pursued by other cops who are unaware that he is a colleague. Chow would rather quit the force, feeling guilty about betraying gang members who have become his friends.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVerloc's cinema front exposes Hitchcock's genius: ordinary domesticity corrupted by espionage, making betrayal lurk beneath suburban normalcy.
Karl Anton Verloc and his wife own a small cinema in a quiet London suburb where they live seemingly happily. But Mrs. Verloc does not know that her husband has a secret that will affect their relationship and threaten her teenage brother's life.
Directed by David Chung
✦ MovieMuse AI takeFemale-led action-espionage hybrid demands women operatives navigate terrorism with tactical precision, challenging era's gender limitations in spy cinema.
When a tough policewoman learns about a group of violent terrorists, she, along with her partner and a Japanese detective, does everything it takes to take them down.
Directed by Masahiro Shinoda
✦ MovieMuse AI takeMasaki Kobayashi's samurai spy transcends period setting to explore how ideological exhaustion makes even skilled agents question their own missions.
Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil. After Sasuke is unwittingly drawn into the conflict, he tracks Tatewaki, while a mysterious, white-hooded figure seems to hunt them both. By tale’s end, no one is who they seemed to be, and the truth is far more personal than anyone suspected. Director Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, filled with clan intrigue, ninja spies, and multiple double crosses, marks a bold stylistic departure from swordplay film convention.
Directed by Michael Powell
✦ MovieMuse AI takePrototypical spy thriller establishing the misdirection playbook: trust fractured through false identities and competing loyalties.
A German submarine is sent to the Orkney Isles in 1917 to sink the British fleet.
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
✦ MovieMuse AI takePost-war thriller's locomotive becomes sealed microcosm where Allied unity fractures under Nazi conspiracy suspicion—paranoia on rails.
In post-war Europe, a diverse group of passengers aboard a U.S. Army train to bombed-out Frankfurt becomes involved in a Nazi assassination plot.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHitchcock's hostage-assassination premise proves the perfect spy MacGuffin: parents weaponized through their daughter, making love itself espionage's leverage.
While vacationing in St. Moritz, a British couple receive a clue to an imminent assassination attempt, only to learn that their daughter has been kidnapped to keep them quiet.
Directed by Tom Tykwer
✦ MovieMuse AI takeInterpol procedural transforms banking systems into spy battleground, proving modern intelligence operates through financial networks, not mere gunplay.
An interpol agent and an attorney are determined to bring one of the world's most powerful banks to justice. Uncovering money laundering, arms trading, and conspiracy to destabilize world governments, their investigation takes them from Berlin, Milan, New York and Istanbul. Finding themselves in a chase across the globe, their relentless tenacity puts their own lives at risk.
Directed by David Chung
✦ MovieMuse AI takePilot-spy resisting occupation forces combines aerial action with resistance networks, grounding espionage in wartime occupation's impossible moral choices.
A daredevil airplane pilot and spy, who fights against the occupying Japanese forces in China, must rescue the ruler of the city of Kaal from the hands of a ruthless Japanese general and his advancing army.
Directed by James Watkins
✦ MovieMuse AI takePickpocket's accidental espionage entry democratizes spy-thriller stakes, suggesting intelligence reaches ordinary citizens.
Michael Mason is an American pickpocket living in Paris who finds himself hunted by the CIA when he steals a bag that contains more than just a wallet. Sean Briar, the field agent on the case, soon realises that Michael is just a pawn in a much bigger game and is also his best asset to uncover a large-scale conspiracy.
MovieMuse finds the perfect movie for tonight across your streaming services —
swipe through spy thriller picks matched to your taste.
Founding period: everything is free — early members keep Premium free for a year.