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AP Photo/Focus Features

Gary Oldman stars in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

The most deliciously satisfying quality of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is hidden in plain sight: it is set in the 1970s. Bucking the trend of stuffing vintage characters like Charlie Croker and James Bond into the present day, director Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John le Carrés 1974 spy novel unfolds like a scrapbook of Cold War culture, reviving steely characters and hard-boiled dialogue that only made sense when the fate of the world seemed to rest on smoke-filled rooms and the keeping of secrets.

The premise of Alfredson's picture is that one of the four or five men who lead MI-6, the British intelligence outfit, is a double agent, leaking choice information to Moscow right under the noses of the rest. Each of the officers appears equally duplicitous, and it falls to George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a retired spy, to sniff out the culprit.

Smiley carries himself with the exacting posture of one for whom all of life is a game of chess. One of the joys of this film is watching him conduct his investigation, pushing the crotchety cold warriors he interviews to remember one more detail, to connect one more dot. His patient fanaticism is gripping and suspenseful because he is always one failed hunch away from becoming a desperate paranoid, like Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation."

Parsing through stolen documents and his own memories of his last year with MI-6, Smiley gradually uncovers an elaborate plot involving the assassination of an undercover operative (Mark Strong) in Hungary, the abandoning of another spy (Tom Hardy) in Istanbul, and a mysterious program for stealing Soviet secrets code-named "Witchcraft." Alfredson bravely forgoes spelling out all these links for the viewer, leading to a delightful morning-after of "Ooh, that's how he knew"-type discoveries.

Smiley eventually captures and confronts the mole, and when he pushes the man to explain who he thinks he is and what he thinks he's done, the character, masterfully acted, cries out, "I'm someone who made his mark!" That is the great insight of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" - that a world that demands absolute conformity is destined to breed opposition in those who simply seek to be individuals. It is a message that feels apposite today, even if the film takes place almost 40 years in the past.

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is a fascinating and compelling picture, beautifully paced and driven by strong performances all the way from Oldman down to the extras. It is also an important reminder that one casualty of the fall of the Iron Curtain is the richly textured spy movie, slow and subtle, with hints of intrigue in each lingering glance and every piercing telephone ring.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

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Directed by Tomas Alfredson

Stars Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Tom Hardy

Rated R. Running time is Two hours, seven minutes. At Amherst Cinema.