The 12th and latest film to be based on a novel by the austere doyen of espionage fiction, John le Carre, may be the least satisfying ever.
It certainly suffers by comparison with the previous three - The Constant Gardener, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and A Most Wanted Man, all of which, perhaps not incidentally, had non-English directors.
White, who directs here, from a banal script by Hossein Amini, has only one feature, a Nanny McPhee sequel, to her credit and her touch is far from assured, though it bears saying that the 2010 source novel is one of the author's less consequential.
![Stellan Skarsgard and Ewen McGregor star in the film Our Kind of Traitor, based on the John Le Carre novel.](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/CKNMVBXXFUNQIZ3WZZTL4XLSCU.jpg?auth=04061b74b0a84405b5206d078378cf8f9bcfcde95b7d0aad57b92973a24e3df7&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
Undaunted by the end of the Cold War, le Carre has found rich material in such diverse places as corporate skulduggery in Africa and the Bush-era practice of rendition. But his villains here are the gangster capitalists of post-Soviet Russia.