The Little Drummer Girl

Ever eager to explore new emotional registers and develop her expressive palette, Diane Keaton ventured into the espionage thriller genre when veteran director George Roy Hill cast her in the lead role for his penultimate feature, adapted from the John Le Carré novel that would later inspire a 2018 Florence Pugh–starring miniseries. Hill and screenwriter Loring Mandel tweaked the age and nationality of Le Carré’s young British protagonist: Keaton’s Charlie Ross is a 30-something American actress with left-wing, anti-Zionist politics who, while on a job in England, becomes entangled in an Israeli military plot to infiltrate and undermine a cell of fighters affiliated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Writing for New York Magazine, the critic David Denby located the movie’s greatest strength in Keaton’s “taut, heartfelt performance,” which “has the force of a confession: Charlie’s desperate shuffling of identities, her grasping at opinions she hasn’t quite made her own, her terrifying sense of vacancy are things that only another actress could fully understand… [Keaton] seems to assert that to play a role well one must possess extraordinary sensitivity to the feelings of others.”