Look closely at that skinny credit font on the Bridge of Spies poster, and there, quietly, lay a legendary tag team listed without ceremony. No, not Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg together for their umpteenth collaboration. It’s Joel and Ethan Coen, the demigods of independent cinema who seem to be making a quiet career out of touching up studio Oscar bait. Last year, their writing touch was far from apparent in the lukewarm and manipulative war drama Unbroken, which they were listed as primary writers. It was a movie that made it apparent that their signature dry wit did not translate to big-budget awards-season drama. Bridge of Spies would, in theory, be an even bigger display a dissonance: the Stony Coens vs. the Spectacle of Spielberg. However, it works better than ever.

Their film – and I say ‘their’ because each provide equal narrative heft – follows the true story of James Donovan (good ole reliable Tom Hanks), a Brooklyn lawyer chosen to represent accused Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (a brilliant Mark Rylance) at the peak of Cold War paranoia in the late ’50s. After softening Abel’s sentence, the government nominates Donovan to quietly negotiate the exchange of American pilot Francis Powers for Abel in Berlin after Powers is shot down over Soviet borders.

‘Bridge of Spies’ thrives on the deadpan conversational tension that has made some of the Coen Brothers best work shine.

To begin, the film may be Spielberg’s quietest film in a decade or so. Like his previous film, the triumphant Lincoln, it’s very light on action and heavy on political chatter. Where Lincoln was interested in bold statements and speeches, Bridge of Spies thrives on the deadpan conversational tension that has made some of the Coen Brothers best work shine. It’s the dry humor that is all-too-often missing from Spielberg’s filmography. And despite his tendency to do as such, he does very little to manipulate the dramatics as he has done so recently. Of course, this is aside from a particularly annoying musical cue during Abel’s shining scene in the film, one of those sequences that the Academy Awards will screen during Rylance’s surefire and well-deserved nomination.

It’s the back and forth between Hanks and Rylance that really sets the tone for the film. Hanks is the joy and Rylance is the melancholy to this Capra-esque thriller. Each knows when to be quiet in place of the other’s voice – a testament to their reigns of the greatest actors of American cinema and British theater. While the film is a touch long, it is a masterclass in political tension and one of the best Cold War films in recent release, if not ever. This, of course, is a testament to the collaboration of Spielberg’s sense of drama and the Coen’s sense of wit. Really, the film is a tribute to this collaboration – like the governments it portrays. Two very opposite sets of filmmakers making a modern near-masterpiece.

Bridge of Spies is now playing everywhere.