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20th September 2025
04:52pm BST

Movie fans are taken to social media to heap praise on Three Days of the Condor, one of the best spy thriller movies of all time, after the death of its star, Robert Redford.
The Oscar-winner passed away on Tuesday (16 September) at the age of 89. Some of his most famous films included All the President's Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, The Great Gatsby, The Natural, The Sting and The Way We Were.
Another one of his classics is Three Days of the Condor, which was released in 1975 and was directed by his frequent collaborator Sydney Pollack.
Based on the James Grady novel Six Days of the Condor, the thriller stars Redford as Joe Turner, a quiet CIA codebreaker.
On a seemingly ordinary day, Joe walks into his workplace and finds that all of his coworkers have been killed.
Horrified, he flees the scene and tries to tell his supervisors about the tragedy, only to learn that CIA higher-ups were involved in the murders.
"With no one to trust, and a merciless hit man (Max von Sydow, The Exorcist) close on his tail, Joe must somehow survive long enough to figure out why his own agency wants him dead," the plot synopsis.
Three Days of the Condor also stars Faye Dunaway as a woman Joe meets while on the run.
Tapping into that post-Watergate paranoia that also inspired other classic thrillers like Blow Out, The Conversation, and The Parallax View, the Redford movie was a hit at the box office and with critics.
The film was praised for the actor's likeable lead performance, the chemistry between him and Dunaway, and the tense and twisty story.
Three Days of the Condor is still highly regarded to this day, and it even got a TV show remake in 2018 that ran for two seasons.
You can read a sample of some of the raves for the original thriller below:
Chicago Sun-Times: "Three Days of the Condor is a well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it's all too believable."
Film Frenzy: "One of a handful of superb 'paranoia thrillers' released during the post-Watergate 1970s, ranking alongside the high-powered likes of The Parallax View, The Conversation, and All the President’s Men."
The Times (UK): "This peerless Sydney Pollack thriller hasn't just aged well, it's become positively prophetic, or at least eerily resonant."
Time Out: "The action rarely falters, and at its best, the film offers an intriguing slice of neo-Hitchcock."
And following the sad news of Robert Redford's passing, many movie lovers have taken to Twitter to recommend Three Days of the Condor.
If you'd like to check out the '70s thriller, it is available to rent in the UK on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, the Sky Store and YouTube.
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