Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd is based on the improbable, stranger-than-fiction career of James Jesus Angleton, the C.I.A.'s head spy catcher for many years, and himself a possible K.G.B. double agent, as some fevered minds at the agency suspected, though it's more likely he was just deranged by the puzzle palace of it all. (At one point, Angleton named Henry Kissinger, Averell Harriman, Olof Palme, and Willy Brandt as Soviet spies.) The script, by Eric Roth {Forrest Gump, Munich), kicked around Hollywood for years. It gained a reputation for being one of those mythic "best unproduced" screenplays, but at the same time one that was too hot to handle, until De Niro—who has for years been fascinated by the period—decided to direct it. He attracted an all-star cast, headed by Matt Damon, whose wholesome, boy-next-door innocence, balanced on the knife edge of the dark side, is perfect for the part, while Angelina Jolie plays his wife. The rest of the cast includes Michael Gambon, John Turturro, William Hurt, Joe Pesci, Alec Baldwin, and De Niro himself. The picture fleshes out the early years of the C.I.A., tracking the journey of Damon's character (renamed James Wilson) from his rah-rah years at Yale, through World War II—when the good guys were really good and the bad guys were really bad—into the newborn agency, where he lost himself in the maze of the Cold War years, looking for moles who may or may not have existed. As luck would have it, the decade or so it took Roth's script to get to the screen has been serendipitous—from the filmmakers' point of view, if not from the intelligence community's—with the picture coming out at a time when the C.I.A. is under more hostile scrutiny than it has been at any point since the Church Committee hearings, in the mid-1970s. The film's theme of idealism gone wrong—if idealism is the word for it—couldn't be more timely. We're not in Tom Clancyland anymore.