Black Bag

Almost more Coward than le Carré, Black Bag favors penetrating parlor conversations over rousing car chases and exotic covert operations.

It's a very brisk 90 minutes, which is always very welcome.

A smartly drawn spy tale. As sophisticated as a dry martini.

This movie is Smooth Soderbergh. It’s brisk, engaging, humorous, well-directed, written and acted. You can put your brain in low gear and sit back and be entertained.

Soderbergh handles ensemble casts well, forming a constellation rather than centering any single person as a lodestar.

Like Presence, it's an interesting genre exercise.

Despite being a spy movie, one of the film's that came to mind was Knives Out (2019), which was obviously inspired by Agatha Christie's stories of Hercules Poirot, a detective who often gets trapped in situations where he has to root out a murderer...

Much of the plot revolves around other people trying to exploit their devotion to each other for their own ends. But their monogamy isn’t a rule to be followed for other ends. It is an end in itself, and it’s their greatest asset.

short and focused, cutting right to the chase and barreling through a brisk, but complex narrative

...along with Soderbergh’s terrific horror thriller, Presence, provided a smashing early-year one-two punch for the director and for the clever screenwriter of both, David Koepp... one of the best films of 2025 to date.