Good Spy vs. Bad Spy

Newsweek, February, 2007 by David Ansen

Things are not always as they seem. That was certainly the case with Robert Hanssen, the devout, graceless, buttoned-down FBI agent who, after 22 years of deception, was revealed to be one of the most treacherous spies working for the Soviets in U.S. history. It's also the case with "Breach," the movie about Hanssen's capture. The conventional wisdom is that any studio movie released in February is, by definition, a dog. But "Breach" is actually a wonderfully taut cat-and-mouse thriller. It features a performance by Chris Cooper, as the eccentric, contradictory Hanssen, that ought to be remembered as one of the year's best come December. Let's hope that awards voters have longer memories than usual.

We know from the get-go that Hanssen's the guilty party: that's not the...

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