This latest spy thriller based on a true story and set in the Cold War of the 1960s is an earnest and tightly constructed tale of interwoven destinies. In 1962, MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA recruited an inexperienced civilian machinery salesman, Greville Wynn, (Benedict Cumberbatch) to enter the USSR under the guise of business and retrieve information from a high-level Russian intelligence official, Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). The intel was being leaked with the hope that the Cuban Missile Crisis would not devolve into a global disaster.

Ironically, based on the novel “The Knife of Never Letting Go” by Patrick Ness, Chaos Walking was announced in 2011 with the expectation that it would be the next YA-adapted bonanza like the “Hunger Games” to follow the Twilight series. But the project immediately ran into problems as the script went through numerous rewrites. Doug Liman of “The Bourne Identity” was brought on to direct and the project was to cast with rising young Hollywood stars Tom Holland (Marvel’s Spiderman) as the protagonist and Daisy Ridley (Rey of Star Wars) as the only woman on a dystopian world where men’s thoughts are verbalized aloud and are visible in a misty cloud that circles their heads.