50 Top 10 Lists of 2007

Top 10 Movies (Richard Schickel)

#6. Breach

Robert Hanssen was arguably the greatest mole in CIA history, a guy who burrowed his way into its most secret files and sold their contents to the Soviet Union for over a decade before he was caught. He's brilliantly played by Chris Cooper in Billy Ray's trim and nicely understated film as a brilliant, angry wing-nut, at once a devout religious fanatic, a porn user-creator and a fuming, but neatly-pressed, bureaucrat. If you set aside the fact that this man cost the lives of many American agents in the USSR, his might have been a Dilbert-like tale of the agony in a bureaucrat's cubicle and this movie makes us well aware of that deadly irony. You don't emerge from Breach "liking" Hanssen, but you do come to understand him: He's the troublemaker in every office, the big talent who deserved the corner office, and will have his revenge for being sidetracked.

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