Argo

When I was told about this movie by a friend, she compared the tension in the big escape scene to queuing up for a Ryanair flight! Pretty accurate description!

Again, I'm way behind the curve - the whole world has seen this movie already. So I won't go into detail.

Argo is set in Tehran  after the fall of the Shah. Demonstrators storm the American embassy and take hostages. A small number of embassy staff manage to escape through a side entrance, and take refuge with the Canadian ambassador. They live there in hiding, and the CIA is looking into ways to get them out of the country - options are thin on the ground. Until an operative comes up with an idea - create a pretend movie, called Argo, and have the embassy staff in the roles of director, casting director, etc pretending to be on a location scouting trip to Tehran  and then have them leave on a plane, in full view.

I won't tell you how it works out. But it's a true story!

You will find in the Wikipedia article that a number of scenes and events in the movie were not historically accurate - apparently the Canadian ambassador and his staff were much more instrumental than the movie gave them credit for. And apparently the British did not turn them away. But it's a movie after all, not a historical documentary - there has to be tension building up, and a sense of "will they? won't they make it?".

It's well worth watching, if you haven't seen it yet!