In real life, they live most of their lives in shadows, doing whatever they can to avoid attention. In the world of movies, spies are front and center, dominating the plots of many of the action and thriller films released each and every year. Like in the Mission: Impossible franchise, whose latest installment, Mission: Impossible - Fallout opens in theaters this month. (This is the sixth Mission: Impossible, by the way. Tom Cruise has been going on impossible missions and almost dying for over 20 years now.)

Over the last 80-plus years, spy films have come in many shapes and sizes. Some, like Fallout, are bombastic blockbusters. Others are slow-burning mysteries. Most concern themselves with matters of national security, but more than a few take a more personal approach. Spy films can be knowingly silly or bleakly brutal. Each and every one, though, has at least one movie poster. And, perhaps because their subject matter is often highly operatic and their visual style is florid and extravagant, they’re often sold with very dramatic one-sheets. A lot of the coolest and most eye-catching movie posters in cinema history belong to the spy genre.

The list below collects our 25 favorites. Note that we are ranking just the posters here, not the content of the movies. Some of these films are downright awful, and I haven’t even seen a handful. But once I saw their posters, I never forgot them.

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