Black Bag

It's March of 2025, so that must mean it's time for cinema's most prolific formerly retired filmmaker to release his second feature film of the year. Steven Soderbergh reteams with blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the director's last two small, original indie movies, the mildly clever COVID-era thriller Kimi and the tedious gimmick ghost movie Presence, for this modern-day spy drama with darkly romantic highlights. Michael Fassbinder and Cate Blanchett play married MI6 agents who are able to keep their relationship true despite working in a profession that requires duplicity and deception. The way the film envisions the office hours and downtime of employment at one of the largest national intelligence agencies in the world is almost like a workplace comedy without many laughs. The couple's idea of entertaining their colleagues is more like an interrogation. Those workmates are played by Naomie Harris (28 Days Later, Skyfall, Moonlight) and Regé-Jean Page (TV's Bridgerton), Tom Burke (The Souvenir, Living, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), and Marisa Abela (who played Amy Winehouse in Back to Black).

Everyone in the cast is fun to watch as they try to outfox each other. Soderbergh, who has served as his own cinematographer since his 2000 Best Picture Oscar-winning Traffic and been his own editor since his 2011 film Haywire (under the names of his parents, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard respectively), works fast and keeps his pictures small, lean, and often muscular, yet most of these last twelve projects have felt woefully underdeveloped. Black Bag has all these stage-three Soderbergh qualities, which keeps the movie engaging and enjoyable but renders it instantly forgettable. I think it's safe to say the director/DP has finished playing with phones and shooting entire films with distorted wide-angle lenses, but he still seems determined to impose some kind of unusual "look" on his movies. In this case, he employs a halation filter that fogs all visible light sources and gives his actor's skin an unflattering, waxy appearance. It's not always pleasant looking at such a potentially sexy movie through such a hazy visual treatment, but I guess the filter and low light are meant to mirror the unclear world these people operate in and evoke an older time in spy cinema to contrast the up-to-date, high-tech setting. I long for Soderbergh to make a great movie again, but until then, I'll always be hopeful when his latest project is a crime movie, as those are by far the best entries of his now lengthy post-retirement period.