The Quiet American has received its Vietnamese premiere, with the country's politicians pouring praise on the Graham Greene adaptation for its realistic representation of pre-Vietnam war Indochina.
Phillip Noyce's retelling of the tale of a CIA agent's naive meddling in French-controlled 1950s Vietnam is the first Hollywood film to be made entirely in the south-east Asian nation.
Recent films about Vietnam, such as We Were Soldiers and Green Dragon, have provoked hostility in the country but Noyce's film has been met with surprised delight.
"Director Phillip Noyce has been very respectful of our history and our people. You don't see that in other movies," Nguyen Thi Hong Ngat of the cinema department under Vietnam's ministry of culture and information told the BBC.
The Quiet American's release was held back in the US because production company Miramax feared its portrayal of American meddling might not go down well amidst the post-September 11 patriotic fervour sweeping the nation.
However a public call from star Michael Caine to Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein for the film to be released eventually won it a limited American run. Caine, who plays a jaded British hack stationed in Saigon opposite Brendan Fraser, is now tipped for an Oscar.
The earlier 1958 film of Greene's novel would probably have met with less support in Vietnam. Joseph L Mankiewicz's adaptation reversed the leftwing bent of the British novelist by casting US war hero Audie Murphy in the title role and making him a victim of the evil commies as opposed to a well-meaning meddler.
Conversely, Die Another Day has not impressed North Korea, which has laid into the new James Bond film for "insulting the Korean nation". The 20th adventure sees Bond trying to stop dastardly North Korean officer Colonel Moon conducting an illegal arms deal in advance of an invasion of South Korea and Japan.
The Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland has called on the US to stop showing the film, claiming it "clearly proves" the US is "the root cause of all disasters and misfortune of the Korean nation" and is "an empire of evil".
