Bridge of Spies is a 2015 historical drama film directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg, written by Matt Charman and the Coen brothers, and starring Tom Hanks in the lead role, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, and Alan Alda.

Set during the Cold War, the film tells the story of lawyer James B. Donovan, who is entrusted with negotiating the release of Francis Gary Powers—a convicted Central Intelligence Agency pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960—in exchange for Rudolf Abel, a convicted Soviet KGB spy held by the United States, whom Donovan represented at trial.

[10] It received critical acclaim for its screenplay, the performances of Hanks and Rylance, Spielberg's direction, Thomas Newman's musical score, and the production values.

Donovan appeals the conviction to the Supreme Court based on the lack of a search warrant for the seizure of Abel's ciphers and photography equipment.

Donovan receives a letter from East Germany, purportedly sent by Abel's wife, thanking him and urging him to get in contact with their lawyer, whose name is Vogel.

The Attorney General seeks to swap Abel for an American graduate student named Frederic Pryor, who had been arrested in East Germany; in the process, the GDR hopes to gain official recognition by the United States.

[13] James Donovan wrote an account of the incident in 1964 under the title Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers.

[15] Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel, who lived and operated in Brooklyn Heights, did dead drops of stolen documents in Prospect Park.

Studio co-founder Steven Spielberg became interested in the script, and decided to direct the film,[17] because his own father traveled to Moscow on a business trip at the time and saw and photographed the wreckage of Powers's plane on public display.

[20] Rylance considered the Coen brothers' revisions to the screenplay to have substantially improved his part, stating that "[l]ooking at the two versions, it was like looking at the first and second quartos of Hamlet.

[23] Francis Gary Powers Jr., founder of The Cold War Museum and the pilot's son, was brought on as a technical consultant and has a cameo in the film.

[35] The scene in the court hallway in which Donovan, to Watters' consternation, announces his intention to appeal the guilty verdict, was filmed on the first floor on the Queens County Supreme Courthouse at 88–11 Sutphin Blvd., Jamaica, New York.

In early October, after filming wrapped in New York City, further production began at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany, and would continue there through the end of November.

[36][37] Filming in Berlin began with shooting at the former Tempelhof Airport in October, for scenes that actually took place there, such as Donovan's descending from a historic C-54 Skymaster.

[41][42] German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former president Bill Clinton visited the set to watch the filming of these scenes.

[57][58] The film opened alongside Goosebumps, Crimson Peak, and Woodlawn on October 16, 2015, facing particular competition from the former, and also from The Martian, which was entering its third week.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Bridge of Spies finds new life in Hollywood's classic Cold War espionage thriller formula, thanks to reliably outstanding work from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks".

[62] Richard Roeper of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and praised Spielberg's direction, saying: "Spielberg has taken an important but largely forgotten, and hardly action-packed slice of the Cold War, and turned it into a gripping character study, and thriller that feels a bit like a John Le Carre adaptation if Frank Capra were at the controls".

Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky described it as "one of the most handsome movies of Spielberg's latter-day phase, and possibly the most eloquent [...] Bridge of Spies turns a secret prisoner exchange between the CIA and the KGB into a tense and often disarmingly funny cat-and-mouse game".

[68] Thomas Sotinel of the French newspaper Le Monde praised the film for harkening back to "classic American cinema", noting Spielberg's virtuosic illustration of the mechanisms of Cold War politics.

[69] On the other hand, Mike Scott of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, had a more mixed reaction, saying: "Bridge of Spies, with its stop-and-go momentum, is also more merely interesting than it is full-on riveting.

Jones wrote that "For all Spielberg, his star-packed cast, led by Tom Hanks, and his on-screen and off-screen team (Joel and Ethan Coen co-wrote the screenplay) bring to the table, Bridge of Spies is remarkable only for how stuffy and surprisingly inert the film becomes".

[72][73] The film also changed the location of Donovan's suggestion to the judge to spare Abel for the sake of a possible exchange, which was made in court.

[76][73] Donovan is presented in the film as a private practice attorney with no mention of any prior association with the United States' intelligence services.