Instant Favorite.

Best movie ever!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

EYE OF THE NEEDLE is an exceptional wartime thriller that I had heard very little about before watching, which is a surprise as I rate it alongside such classics of the genre as THE EAGLE HAS LANDED and DAY OF THE JACKAL, two films which it feels very much like. It's a story set in rural Britain, where ruthless Nazi spy Donald Sutherland has just got wind (and evidence) of the fake Calais invasion plans and must get word back to the Fatherland. The whole outcome of the war hinges on whether he manages to do so, which makes for one of those thrillers that's packed with suspense from the very beginning until the very end. This is a film made with a gritty, nasty streak to it and Sutherland is thoroughly convincing here, just as good as he was playing the hero of DON'T LOOK NOW and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. The film possesses a great cast, all of whom do no wrong, and in the second half it turns into a small-scale but riveting psycho thriller of the kind that would become popular in Hollywood a decade later. I really recommend it.

Hiding behind the mask of calm solitude, Nazi German spy Donald Sutherland is as quiet a killing machine as he is a lover. Having British secrets on the intention of a full scale on Germany, Sutherland doesn't hesitate to knife anybody who stands in his way, even co-conspirators he feels might reveal too much if captured. While trying to get the information to a German submarine, his boat capsizes, and he ends up on a British island where he is nursed back to health by the unhappily married Kate Nelligan and Christopher Cazenove, crippled in a car accident on their wedding night. Sutherland's presence brings out a longing for love by Nelligan and suspicion by Cazenove, and as Nelligan gets clues of her own, she realizes that she's fallen in love with a monster. Subtle and mesmerizing, this gives an on-site into the insanity which took over the minds who chose to follow the Nazi regime. The story switches back and forth between the British investigation as to his whereabouts and Nelligan's plot to prevent him from going any further. The strength of individuals determined to stop evil keeps you on the edge of your seat, and the fact that Sutherland delivers such a quiet, often thoughtful performance, makes his character all the more creepy. This may not be in the realm of other recent Nazi related movies (such as "Marathon Man" and "The Boys From Brazil"), but it's extremely riveting none the less.

Wonderful World War 11 thriller with Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan providing fine chemistry and two people brought together by fate, he is a German spy trying to get back to Germany with information about D-Day and she is trapped in a bad marriage with a husband who lost his legs on their wedding day.There is a wonderful score by Miklos Rosza in this film. It provides crescendo similar to that of Rosza's Oscar-winning scoring of "Ben-Hur" in 1959. With this theme, you can immediately identify it as a work of Miklos Rosza. His distinct style of musical scoring has yet to be topped.Sutherland is terrific as the spy who was supposedly revered by Hitler himself. A loner who is vicious to the core, his soft-spoken facade masks a killer beyond belief. Nelligan, looking for love, thinks that she has found it until she realizes that Sutherland has killed her husband.The tension builds to a climatic ending where the Nelligan character has done the allies a tremendous service.

From a distance, an everyday moviegoer might doubt the production value of this movie. A 1982 Ken Follett adaptation that's hardly available on DVD? Well, it's made by the same director as Return of the Jedi. Yet when it begins and unfolds, it's reminiscent of nothing so much as one of those unsentimental, persevering, discreetly disturbing, and, on a few occasions, blackly hilarious war movies that used to be made by the former British film industry. Donald Sutherland plays the kind of reserved sociopath who should ideally thrive in black-and-white movies, yet the color here is sometimes funereal enough to avail. This unaffected thriller is made with humble potency.It is about a German spy, Die Naadel, who dropped out of sight in Germany in 1938 and now inhabits a series of drab bed-sitting-rooms in England while he spies on the British war effort. He is known as the Needle because of his signature means of dispatch. He kills with an exceptional absence of feeling. As played by Sutherland with a rather stand-offish, cool, and even critical manner, the Needle is a man no one knows. We are given inklings to account for his rationale: He was raised by parents who did not love him, he was shipped off to boarding schools, he spent parts of his childhood in America, where he learned English. None of the account altogether clears up his viciousness, but then I suppose it is no more than a secret agent's business to be vicious. Perhaps it's no one's fault someone is ruthless.Ken Follett's deftly communicated thread is by inches both undercover operations and mystery. The Needle unravels a hoax to evade the Germans. His task is to be the very one to confront Die Fuhrer with the information of the actual Allied invasion plans. This he means to do with every tissue of his being, and yet we never get the sense that this man is a nationalist. He is more of an existentially decisive, unbending envoy. In his endeavors to convene with a Nazi submarine, he's shipwrecked on a remote island populated merely by a lighthouse keeper and a goat-farming family comprised of a woman played by the emotionally receptive Kate Nelligan, her legless husband and their son.The last third of the movie turns into a blood-spattered drama in which the action is more pertinent than the characterization. But before that, he poses as just a shipwrecked seafarer. And Nelligan, her appearance fittingly preceded by her co-star being adrift at sea, is disheartened by her husband's drunkenness and unwillingness to love, and becomes endeared to the stranger. Does he become enamored of her? We can never be certain, though he tells her things he has told to no one else.It is compelling to build a plot like this at a studious tread, rather than rushing head on through it. It gives us time to weigh the character of the Needle, and to contemplate his exceptionally scant, mysterious allusions to what he feels versus what he thinks. Instead of an unambiguously good and evil clash, despite the melodrama of the last act, we have by then learned things about him that he may not even know about himself, and that is why the film's final scene is so much more intricate than it appears.