This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Here’s a first for this column: a review of a film in which I appear. The Last Spy, showing on Prime Video, is a captivating documentary about Peter Sichel, a German-Jewish refugee who rose to high rank in the American intelligence services.
Born in 1922 to a prosperous family of wine merchants in Mainz, Sichel escaped the Nazis for the United States. As a native German speaker, he was quickly recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Sichel flourished in the world of shadows. He was appointed OSS station chief in Berlin, running agents into the Soviet sector, and was known as the “Wunderkind”.
In 1952 Sichel returned to Washington DC as chief of the CIA’s operations across the Soviet bloc. There he became increasingly disillusioned as Allen Dulles, the megalomaniacal CIA director, brought down inconvenient governments from Iran to Guatemala.
The CIA and its allies also kept dropping anti-communist guerrillas into Albania and China to foment revolution. Sichel told his bosses that the missions would fail, but they went ahead anyway, sending many brave men to their deaths.
Then, as now, the intelligence bosses did not want to believe inconvenient facts. As Sichel observes, “If the intelligence does not fit, they don’t believe the intelligence.” The ex-spy is an engaging star, self-effacing and often dryly witty. Nor does he whitewash the human cost and ethical price that espionage demands.
Director Katharina Otto-Bernstein skilfully draws him out, balancing the film’s human interest whilst bringing enough geopolitical context. Sichel’s memoir was censored by the CIA, but he seems to speak freely in the film — although of course every spy holds secrets that they will never share.
Sichel served in Hong Kong in the late 1950s, keeping a watching brief on mainland China. In 1959 he resigned from the CIA. He moved to the wine business where he gained fame and riches as the man who popularised Blue Nun. As for your critic, I appear twice opining about geopolitics and America’s wartime need for an intelligence service.
There is a small charge to buy or rent the film. It’s money well spent. The closing shots, where Sichel ascends the stairs at his home on his chairlift, are almost too poignant. The Last Spy lived to 102 and passed away in 2025. Raise a glass — not necessarily of Blue Nun — to a long life, very well lived.
In my other capacity as a critic, covering thrillers for the Financial Times, I have reviewed several works by the television journalist Tom Bradby. His latest, Red Scorpion, set in London and Bogotá, is one of his best, with a notably original storyline featuring an A&E doctor and a reluctant cocaine mogul.
Sadly, the same cannot be said about Secret Service, a new five-part spy drama showing on ITVX. The series is based on Bradby’s book of the same name, one of several featuring Kate Henderson, a senior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service.
The book came out in 2019, and the storyline goes heavy on Moscow’s nefarious doings. There’s a nasty Russian oligarch in Malta and a potential Russian mole in the British government.
Henderson is on the trail of the bad guys, whilst juggling her family responsibilities and an inquisitive but supportive husband.
She agonises about using her source, a vulnerable young woman, to place a bugged cigar box inside the oligarch’s seaside villa but goes ahead anyway. It’s only a mild spoiler to say that this does not go well.
The story clips along at a decent pace, the settings in Malta are dazzling and the scenes set inside Whitehall’s corridors of power feel solid enough. Gemma Arterton turns in an engaging performance as Kate Henderson, dashing between her super-spacious state-of-the art kitchen at home and grubby SIS safe houses.
Roger Allam brings depth as Sir Alan Brabazon, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, exuding just the right mix of menace and expectation that Kate will deliver the goods. Secret Service is a pleasant enough diversion for a few hours.
But in a world of television drama that brings forth brilliant series such as Slow Horses, Tehran and The Bureau, Secret Service, with its Russian moles and brutal oligarchs, feels just a bit dated.
Day One, in contrast, could not be more topical. This entertaining Spanish techno-thriller, showing on Prime Video, takes a deep — and frighteningly plausible — dive into where AI might one day take us. Which seems to be nowhere good.
Ulises is a prodigy who left the tech world after the death of his sister. His former partner Samuel calls him back to Barcelona to warn him that the future of humanity is in danger from a revolutionary new technology. Samuel is swiftly murdered, and Ulises is framed as the main suspect.
Behind the scenes Damián, an evil tech genius, is planning to launch Day One, a programme so powerful it can reshape human emotions and behaviour.
At times the series seems unsure in which genre it is operating, lurching from corporate infighting to a good old-fashioned chase thriller. Ulises and his female sidekick Rebeca, a social media whizz kid, go on the run, pursued by a chillingly efficient assassin leaving bodies all over Barcelona.
Meanwhile Damián is ascending to ever-higher heights of megalomania in his hyper-modern concrete redoubt. He will let nobody stand in the way of the launch — no matter what the cost.
Thankfully, Ulises and Rebeca have other ideas.
