This beautifully constructed film finishes with Morris asking one last question. What does the spy novelist see these days when he looks in the mirror?

| Oct 27, 2023

“The Pigeon Tunnel” is mannered, but one could argue that’s fitting. It’s hard to get more mannered than the le Carré prose style and plotting.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 27, 2023

For le Carré fans, “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a must-see, but the film will also be useful to people wanting an introduction to his work.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 27, 2023

The actual film that Morris delivers is delightful; the one he didn’t make, but that it implies, is great.

| Oct 25, 2023

The Pigeon Tunnel is a probing film, one which interrogates Le Carre about his childhood and early years, drawing a line between his experiences and his characters.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 24, 2023

Rich anecdotes, the professorial observations, the carefully phrased confessions after the director’s philosophical softballs about a life steeped in betrayal and imagination — they’re all handsomely presented in one of Morris’ most atmospheric packages.

| Oct 23, 2023

A brisk, enjoyable, and minor work that serves as a cinematic epilogue for its subject, who died in December 2020 at the age of 89.

| Oct 20, 2023

Maybe the best reason to watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” though, is that it is a reminder of what documentaries can be when they’re made by a real filmmaker with sophisticated and cinematic ambitions.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 20, 2023

A uniquely delicious documentary to watch, akin to doing a jigsaw puzzle...

| Oct 20, 2023

[A] cagey, brilliant film...

| Oct 20, 2023

By the end we know more about Cornwell in a biographical sense. What we really know about him as a person is less clear.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 20, 2023

[The Pigeon Tunnel] feels like a collaboration of kindred spirits. It is, above all, utterly entertaining and, though one hesitates to admit it, thoroughly convincing.

| Oct 19, 2023

It is a thankfully unconventional approach to le Carré, but illustrative to long-time readers and neophytes alike.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 19, 2023

It could have been just a transcript; It would have been a must-read.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 19, 2023

Le Carré often plays the breezy cynic, but Morris gets to his real fury at the hack theatre of it all.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 19, 2023

Even if you have never read a le Carré novel — or seen one of the many movies based on them — “The Pigeon Tunnel” will delight the curious.

| Oct 19, 2023

A biographical documentary as compellingly elusive as you might expect of a film about the late spy novelist John le Carré.

| Original Score: B | Oct 17, 2023

The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film's energy. The director even visualizes the idea that reality is prismatic rather than linear, occasionally fracturing the image of le Carré and his genteel environs.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 17, 2023

An interrogation of art and artist, The Pigeon Tunnel is an enthralling documentary both for fans of le Carré and those who’ve never read a page of his work.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 17, 2023

Errol Morris’s biographical documentaries have got to the heart of figures ranging from Stephen Hawking to Donald Rumsfeld, but in John le Carré he has found a subject as unknowable as he is eloquent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 13, 2023