The Playlist

Paddy Considine's 'Tyrannosaur' Also Wins Seven Nods, 'Kevin' & 'Kill List' Close BehindWhen "Chariots of Fire" writer Colin Weiland announced on stage at the 1982 Oscars that "The British are coming!," it went on to live in infamy; the British failed to come, and the U.K. film industry continued on much as it had before. But if David Seidler or Tom Hooper had exclaimed the same at the Academy Awards this February, there might have been less egg on their face -- the victory, and huge box office success of "The King's Speech" has been a precursor to the best year for British film that we can remember.

Gary Oldman Says Sequel Could Be A Composite Of 'The Honourable Schoolboy' And 'Smiley's People'It's hard to say that the spy genre doesn't love a franchise. The longest running franchise in cinema history is, of course, the James Bond series, Jason Bourne is Universal's biggest tentpole, and from Harry Palmer to Jack Ryan, if audiences show even a sniff on interest in a character, executives will happily bring them back for future installments, which is why we've had to suffer through things like "xXx2" and "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London" over the years.

Check out these slick-looking dudes in the "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" trailer. No one trusts anyone, no one is comfortable even walking around the corner, and everyone's got some sort of wicked coat. This feels like the sort of paranoid drunken nightmare someone has after passing out underneath a pile of GQ magazines in a smoking jacket. The John le Carré adaptation debuted earlier in the week at the Venice Film Festival, where we called it "incredibly rich and perfectly constructed," comments we're usually receiving, not giving, and opens in the U.K. next Friday, but the new clip is the first targeted at a U.S. audience.

The spy genre, is generally speaking, a euphemism for 'action movie' -- look at the explosions, fistfights and car chases of the Bond films, of the 'Mission: Impossible' series, of the 'Bourne' franchise, none of which have much in the way of actual tradecraft. The business of being a spy is hard, boring work, made up of listening and talking and without a lot of glamor. One of the men who best understands this is novelist John Le Carré, himself a former spy, who for close to half a century has been behind some of the most acclaimed literary examples of the genre. But aside from the much-loved "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," and the more recent "The Constant Gardener" (the latter not strictly speaking an espionage picture), his works haven't had a huge amount of success on the big screen, lacking the speedboats and fireballs of Ian Fleming or Robert Ludlum. One of the writer's best-known books is "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," the first of the 'Karla' trilogy, which focuses on George Smiley, a middle-aged veteran of 'The Circus' (Le Carré's term for the British intelligence services) and his rivalry with his Soviet counterpart Karla. Working Title Films has spent the last couple of years on a new cinematic take with Tomas Alfredson, director of the much-acclaimed "Let the Right One In," making his English-language debut at the helm. It's no small undertaking, considering that the novel was previously adapted as a much-loved, seven-part, 290-minute BBC miniseries, headed up by an indelible performance from the great Alec Guinness. Alfredson might have assembled an all-star cast of British talent to bring the book to life, but could the company, led by Gary Oldman taking up Smiley's thick glasses, hope to match their predecessors? And could the film manage to keep the plot coherent and thrilling at a running time less than half of what the TV take had to play with?