When I reviewed "Salt", a spy thriller which came out in 2010 but could have been made, with only a few changes to the plot, in the fifties, sixties or seventies, I said that some American film-makers seemed to be living in an alternative reality in which the Berlin Wall never fell, the Soviet Union survived into the twenty-first century and the Cold War is still continuing. And eight years on we have "Red Sparrow", made in 2018 but which could have been made, with virtually no changes to the plot, in the fifties, sixties or seventies. The adjective "red" in the title implies that Americans still think of Russians as communists.

Dominika Egorova is a beautiful young star of the Bolshoi Ballet who suffers an injury which ends her dancing career. Now, given that Dominika is a famous prima ballerina, one would have thought there would have been plenty of opportunities for her to continue working in the world of ballet, either as a teacher or on the administrative or production side, but according to the film the only alternative employment Dominika can find to keep the wolf from the door and to continue funding medical treatment for her elderly mother is as a spy. And she only gets that job through her paternal uncle Ivan, a high-up official in the SVR (new name for the KGB).

As part of her new profession Dominika becomes a sparrow. Not, of course, in the literal sense of the word; a "sparrow" in this sense is a spy trained in the arts of seduction to obtain information from a target. Her mission is to seduce Nate Nash, a CIA operative, and obtain the identity of "Marble", a mole in the upper echelons of the Russian government who is leaking information to the Americans. I won't set out the plot in any further detail, because in the age-old tradition of the espionage movie it becomes very complicated, but it inevitably involves Dominika and Nate falling in love.

Before seeing this film, I had never previously seen any film starring Jennifer Lawrence, although I had certainly heard her name often enough. Actually, she is one of the best things about this movie, giving a very good performance as Dominika, making her both icily seductive and at the same time sympathetic. Of course, we are given to understand that Dominika's heart is not really in her work and that she has been virtually forced into espionage by the ruthless Ivan. (Indeed, the film's position seems to be that most, if not all, Russian spies have taken up that line of work because they have been forced into it by the authorities and are too frightened to refuse. The idea that Russians might be motivated to serve their country by patriotism in the same way as Americans does not seem to have occurred to the scriptwriters).

There is another decent performance from Matthias Schoenaerts as Ivan- I found myself wondering if he had been cast because he bears a certain resemblance to a younger version of Vladimir Putin- but Joel Edgerton does not make much impression as Nate. My main criticisms of the film, however, do not have anything to do with the acting. I said above that the plot is complicated- in fact it is excessively so, and often difficult to follow. At around 140 minutes, the film is also overlong, and could have done with some judicious pruning. (Possibly by removing the sub-plot about Dominika's colleague Marta, who is running an SVR plot to obtain classified information from an American politician's aide).

I also found the film gratuitously violent in places, but my main reason for disliking it was that it attempted to breathe new life into a moribund genre, and failed. It is a film at least forty years behind the times, a film which panders to a growing xenophobia in America (and elsewhere in the West) about Russia, a form of xenophobia which now seems as widespread on the political left as it is on the right. 5/10

A goof. "Marta" is not a Russian name; the Russian form would be "Marfa".