Trace almost anything interesting in new films back a bit and Alex Cox will pop up at some point. The man links Ed Harris and Miguel Sandoval with Edward Tudor-Pole and Michelle Winstanley, and should be on the loose constantly.
My main memory of watching Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy at the time is of wanting to keep perfectly still in case he saw me and took my head off. Seeing him disappear behind the complicated defences of George Smiley all these years later is like watching a nuclear reactor boil a kettle, but no less engaging for that. A shame that the new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy decides not to tackle one of the characters that made Smiley’s defences complicated in the first place, by leaving Ann Smiley out of it.