Best movie of this year hands down!

What makes it different from others?

Boring

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I have seen many films about espionage, but I like this one much. 40 years of cold war have changed everything, CIA has played a dominant role in that great game. The espionage in Berlin, Hungarian revolution, the bay of pigs,murder of Fideo Castro, all major historical events are shown by this film. I admire the courage of agents, the three classmates eventually go on three quite different ways, spy, counterspy, double agent. You will keep mysterious through the program: who is Sasha? who betrayed them? I can really feel the dangers and greatness in the field of espionage. Everything is just a show, just a plot. I heard real espionage is more complex than films. Can I enter this secretive world someday?

This is a master class by Michael Keaton. Though I never knew James Angleton, I've read plenty about him and Keaton absolutely nailed it.This little mini-series was OK. A bit unlikely with the love-interest parts and highly unlikely with the re-union scene in Austria. The CIA's involvements in certain major events are simply left out. I'm thinking East Asia, South America, running drugs etc, but hey, let's not get too uncomfortable.Was it worth watching? Yes. Would I watch it again? No. It's nowhere near the BBC's original Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, but worth it for Keaton's Angleton.

The miniseries went out of fashion when the networks started economizing, so it's nice to see this one from TNT. "The Company," which refers to the CIA, stars Chris O'Donnell, Alfred Molina, Michael Keaton, Rory Cochrane, Alessandro Nivola, and Natascha McElhone, along with a huge international cast.The series purports to tell of some of the big events in which the CIA was involved throughout its history, woven in with the search for an elusive double agent, an American version of Kim Philby (who is also a character in the film, portrayed by Tom Hollander). The period covered is 40 years, from the start of the Cold War to the fall of the Soviet Union and focuses on the experiences of three fictional Yale grads, class of '54: Jack McCauliffe (O'Donnell), Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola), and Yevgeny Tsipin (Rory Cochrane).This is a very absorbing miniseries with some great, good, and blah acting, in my opinion. Though it's understood that Alfred Molina is an excellent actor, for me, his portrayal of Harvey, Jack's boss, was a little too stagy. Chris O'Donnell was okay, coming off as a lesser Leonardo di Caprio or Matt Damon. For me the two great portrayals were those of Michael Keaton as James Angleton, the real-life chief of the CIA's counterintelligence unit, and Alessandro Nivola, who is an accomplished stage actor and gives a strong performance.Not surprisingly, this film came on the heels of the feature "The Good Shepherd," also about the CIA and starring Matt Damon. Because it has the luxury of being a miniseries, it's more detailed. Recommended.

The Company is a pretty decent mini-series about the CIA and the Cold War; I found it informative and well put together, even though a number of crucial CIA moments were absent. The cast was uniformly good, and even though no amount of make-up and prosthetics can make Chris o'Donnell look older than 22, I thought he was OK.Make no mistake, this is not John Le Carre stuff: it is not drenched in nihilism, pointlessness and failure, even though it does not seem to be James Bond Universe either. More than anything, one is left with the impression that all little treasons and nonsense aside, there is some sort of idealization and nostalgia for the Cold War, when you knew who threatened you and why and why you had to fight ( even thought both CIA and KGB pictured themselves as the good guys and protectors of the common folk). Molina's character near the end summarizes a view of the cold war that seems to be prevalent these days, that the side who screwed up less won and that the USSR looked pretty good on paper but was really flawed.If you consider that it's only been 17 years since the demise of the Soviet Union, this detachment is pretty impressive. But then it goes to show how different the world has become today.