BLACK BAG (2025)

Sleek, stylish, sexy? Yes, yes and yes. What more can be said about Black Bag, a new spy thriller from director Steven Soderbergh – Out of Sight (1998), The Limey (1999), Ocean’s Eleven (2001). It is indeed a laser-focused story of espionage with secret agents being married and/or in entanglements, exuding accomplished day-to-day deception skills and managed paranoia. This combination becomes quite fascinating thanks to a script stacked with duplicitous dialogue and characters trained to hold their cards in matter of ways to deceive and endear. Not a word or stutter is unaccounted for, with every movement being deliberate for some reason or another. Michael Fassbender – Shame (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011), The Killer (2023) and Cate Blanchett – The Aviator (2004), Tár (2022), Rumours (2024) – exude a unique heat as the central married MI6 couple whose work and personal lives are fused into a stressful and quite glamorous life in London, England. With loyalties in question, we are privy to the elegant dance that unfolds between the power couple, starting with a dinner party involving coupled co-workers and a spiked chana masala. The menace at play is slowly revealed and entrancing thanks to the economical dialogue and sheer beauty of the endeavour (Soderbergh once again serves as his own cinematographer and editor). This is a fun, compact drama for attentive movie lovers who like their spy movies to be sleek, stylish, sexy and short. Soderbergh rightly keeps it quick at one hour and thirty three minutes, a bold decision that respects the story and its audience.

WATCH OR NOT: WATCH

Additional musings: My only criticism is the score. Soderbergh films tend to have a sound that I suppose is intended to be clever, but they always ring hokey to me.