Atomic Blonde (2017)

Atomic Blonde is a 2017 American action thriller directed by David Leitch, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City. Charlize Theron stars as Lorraine Broughton, an elite MI6 spy sent to Berlin in November 1989, just days before the fall of the Wall, to recover a list of double agents and investigate the murder of a fellow operative. Navigating a treacherous landscape of shifting alliances between MI6, the CIA, the KGB, and the French DGSE, Lorraine must determine who among her contacts — including the unreliable Berlin station chief David Percival, played by James McAvoy — can be trusted.

Charlize Theron trained for months in martial arts and performed the vast majority of her own fight choreography, and the results were extraordinary — the stairwell fight sequence, staged to appear as a single, unbroken 10-minute take, was one of the most brutally realistic hand-to-hand combat scenes in modern cinema, with Lorraine visibly exhausted, bleeding, and barely surviving each encounter. The 1980s Berlin setting was accompanied by a wall-to-wall soundtrack of era-appropriate New Wave and synth-pop tracks. Atomic Blonde earned $100 million worldwide on a $30 million budget.