That three-star rating for the new Steven Soderbergh movie “Black Bag” is a matter of personal preference.
Kick it up by half a star if your tastes run to John le Carré espionage thrillers crossed with marital cage matches like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Dock it the same amount if you don’t like talky, complex, fiendishly intelligent head games.
- Starring: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Pierce Brosnan.
- Rating: R for contains language including some sexual references and some violence.
Me? I like it, while also recognizing that this is the latest effortless Soderbergh miniature, acted by a game and glittering cast while never breaking a sweat. It’s good, brainy fun, but I do miss the days when this director sweated a bit more.
After an amuse-bouche of an opening scene, “Black Bag” settles into a dinner party at which the stakes are discreetly high.
Our chef is George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), a British intelligence agent with the best poker face in the business and what appears to be a loving marriage to Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett).
She’s a glamorous and legendary field operative, while George is just as legendary for his slightly scary, slightly on-the-spectrum gift for three-dimensional chess. He’s also a fantastic cook.
Their four guests, all co-workers, are looking nervously forward to the meal. What else is on the menu?
The diners include back-office agent Freddie (Tom Burke), a blustering prat; Clarissa (Marisa Abela), a surveillance expert and Freddie’s lover; James (Regé-Jean Page), a slick, ambitious agent who just beat Freddie out for a promotion; and Zoe (Naomie Harris), the agency’s government-required psychiatrist.
One of them is a mole, a traitor who may be giving a rogue computer program to the enemy. It might even be Kathryn. None of this comes up at the dinner, which is mostly a smoke screen for the host’s careful weighing and balancing of the personalities involved. Behind his opaque Michael- Caine as Harry-Palmer glasses, George is a processing machine of possibilities, a human lie detector.
The rogue program is called Severance (which is probably coincidental to the current Apple TV Plus series), but “Black Bag” does function as a delightfully weird office drama with lightning flashes of comedy and multiple layers of motivation.
After that dinner party ends with a knife through someone’s hand — don’t worry, it’s just a bit of romantic byplay — we settle into the corridors and glass offices of whatever top-secret MI5-6-7 unit this is supposed to be. The top dog is a cool Savile Row suit named Arthur (Pierce Brosnan), under whose watch the many crisscrosses and subterfuges of David Koepp’s script play out. When he’s working with Soderbergh (this is their third collaboration after “Kimi” and “Presence”) Koepp writes the kind of sleight-of-hand movie dialogue where what is said is rarely what is meant and where what is meant is often a matter of life and death.
I will leave you to discover the rest of the plot on your own and to enjoy the performances of Fassbender and Blanchett as a power couple whose love for and trust in each other is never in question, even when it very much is. They’re a spectacular mismatch — the prom queen and the nerd — and you can tell the contrast gets them hot.
To get to the bottom of things, George must make deals and hatch plans with the others, and the suspense of “Black Bag” is in them and us trying to figure out George’s long game. If there is one, and if it’s smarter than Kathryn’s.
This is one of those movies where you stand in the lobby afterward, adding up the math on your fingers. When all the cards of “Black Bag” are finally turned over, does the story make sense? (I think it does.) Has the game been worth it? Yes, but you may feel you’ve solved a particularly difficult sudoku and are ready to move on with the rest of your life.
That’s unfair, though, because these days, the pleasure of a Steven Soderbergh movie is in the moviemaking itself — storytelling of minimal gestures and absolute mastery.
Along with the recent “Presence,” “Black Bag” finds the director back in theaters after a spate of work for Netflix and Max: tight, unpretentious genre pieces that make other movies look lumbering and dumb. With nothing more to prove and a proper aversion to bloat, Soderbergh has achieved the grace of the old studio greats, turning out film after film with a high rate of return because that’s the reason he was put on Earth.
“Black Bag” is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.
First Published: March 14, 2025, 9:30 a.m.
