The historian and curator of the International Spy Museum sees his profession all over the ‘Star Wars’ universe.

An unhappy customer reported seeing a woman dart in and out of a screening of a documentary about the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Are Chinese spies afoot in our movie theaters? Probably not.

You could spend an entire essay talking about the visual detail of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. This is a film that never needs a word to express that it’s not just about the Cold War, but about cold men, cold interactions, a cold decade. There’s the grey, muted color scheme that creates an eternal autumn out of the entirety of the 70s. The pale, doughy faces of men who look as if they’ve never seen the sun, faces sitting under bad haircuts and worse combovers, sequestered in smoky, soundproof underground rooms discussing the activities of their intelligence counterparts in other countries, who are likely also overwhelmingly pale, male, and grimly disaffected. The wallpaper is textured, the filing cabinets metallic and industrial, and the secretarial pool seems designed to take leering gazes just as much as they take dictation.