Let 'Salt' Whet Your Appetite for These 10 Great Spy Movies

Salt, Angelina Jolie's latest high-adrenaline adventure, opens today. The ever-intense actress plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA spy who may (or may not) be a Russian double agent.

Of course, Salt is just the latest in a long, long line of espionage movies. If seeing Angelina kick ass and hide under a rubber face mask doesn't sate your taste for spies, here are 10 (or more) of the all-time greatest spy movies to keep you warm and paranoid on a hot summer night:

The Day of the Jackal -This 1973 movie (based on a Frederick Forsyth novel) remains a winning, suspenseful movie, in which a professional assassin codenamed "Jackal" plots to kill French president Charles de Gaulle. If you can't find it on DVD, the 1997 remake, The Jackal, starring Bruce Willis, is also quite good.

The Bourne trilogy - Okay, I'm cheating and lumping all of these into one because they're just too good to only pick a single movie. Matt Damon is great as Jason Bourne, a spy suffering from amnesia and well-deserved paranoia. The action sequences are lean, mean and more believable than in most movies. While the films don't slow down for much characterization, the plots are intricate enough to keep you entertained.

Three Days of the Condor - Director Sydney Pollack's classic stars Robert Redford as a CIA researcher whose co-workers all turn up dead. Will he be next? With no one left to trust, Redford's "Condor" goes on the run. This thriller will leave you guessing until the end, even after 35 years.

Goldfinger - It's tough to pick just one James Bond movie for this list, but I'm going with this 1964 Sean Connery classic. Bond engages in actual espionage this time around, unlike some 007 movies in which he is motivated more by revenge. A few things are dated — that killer hat is just silly — but Auric Goldfinger is one of the all-time great movie villains.

The Austin Powers movies - Again, I'm not picking one, because they're basically the same movie. But they're all funny, so what's not to love?

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - Ah, now we're talking spies. Based on a John le Carré novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold stars Richard Burton as a spy who refuses to come home, instead choosing to go through one more Cold War mission. This is the first movie with le Carré's famous character George Smiley, later to be played by Sir Alec Guinness in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and Smiley's People — also classics.

The Fourth Protocol - Another adaptation of a Frederick Forsyth novel. This tense flick pits British spy catcher Michael Caine against a Russian KGB agent (played by Pierce Brosnan) determined to set off a nuclear bomb in the UK. Brosnan's role is small, but powerfully played.

Notorious - I had to pick at least one Alfred Hitchcock movie for this list, and while North By Northwest might be more popular, it's more about Cary Grant's innocent schlub getting caught up in espionage than it is about espionage itself. No, for that you need Notorious, also starring Grant but this time with an actual spy plot, not to mention Ingrid Bergman in one of her best performances.

Traitor - One of the most thoughtful movies on this list. Don Cheadle plays a former US soldier, a devout Muslim himself, who goes undercover with a group of Muslim terrorists. But where do his true loyalties lie? The movie presents more moral questions than it answers, and shows, better than most spy movies, how hard espionage is on the people who conduct it.

Spartan - No one else I know has seen this complex movie, written and directed by David Mamet and starring Val Kilmer, but don't let that stop you. It's another of Mamet's complicated shell games — more like The Spanish Prisoner than his TV show, The Unit — with a twisted plot that starts off as one thing and reveals itself to be something else. Trust me, you'll like it.

Still in a spying mood? Well, you can't go wrong with some of Salt director Phillip Noyce's earlier films, like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger (both adapted from Tom Clancy novels), or one of my favorites, The Quiet American, which isn't quite an espionage movie, but was re-titled as The Spy in some foreign markets, so it kind of counts.

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Photo 1 courtesy Official Salt Facebook page, Photos 2&3 via Wikipedia.