There's a trilogy of excellent spy films, packed with top British Character actors: Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Helena Bonham Carter, Saskia Reeves, etc etc. and some none-too-shabby international support from the likes of Winona Ryder, Christopher Walken, Dylan Baker, Judy Davis, etc etc. Screenplay and direction, David Hare. Produced by the BBC.

Thing is, I was completely unaware of these films. Am I alone in this ignorance?

Page Eight, Turks & Caicos, and Salting the Battlefield.

We saw Turks & Caicos a while back. Moderately amusing, kind of a classier Death In Paradise romp.

Just watched all three again, and I have to agree about Turks & Caicos. They definitely went all out to save a bit when it came to staging, and it isn't David Hare's finest hour and thirty five as a director. Page Eight is the best of the three. Bill Nighy leaks more understated charm than a tin of condensed gentility, but either he's 20 years too old or Helena Bonham Carter is twenty years too young. It's the Picard effect. Curiously he was only just 65 when the last film in the trilogy was made, but he looked 75.

I thought it quite funny how it was implied (but never demonstrated) that Bill's character was too dangerous to fuck with for assorted baddies.

It was funny, but it missed. If you want to build a character without showing every detail of their life from birth to the time-line of the film, then it takes planning, scripting and editing. I felt that tropes and cliches were just being plugged in. Made the whole thing seem lightweight. When there were dramatic scenes, they felt out of place: odd vignettes. That was true in the last movie as well.

It (the film) was a pleasant enough fantasy that probably functioned as a tourism promo as much as anything.

That's even odder. I quite enjoyed the whole trilogy. Probably a tribute to the quality of the cast.