Directed by Steven Soderbergh | Written by David Koepp | 93 min | ▲▲▲▲

Full marks to Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp, who in this third month of 2025 have had two feature films in cinemas since the new year. The first, a haunted house movie called Presence, felt like more of a formal exercise from the creative team who gave us the excellent Kimi. Black Bag something else entirely, a dead sexy British spy thriller, one that asks, “How do relationships manage to thrive and survive in a business of deceit?” Turns out, they frequently don’t, but when they do it’s because the lovers are totally into each other,  totally committed to the union, even more than their dangerous jobs.

Here it’s Michael Fassbender as George Woodhouse — a buttoned-down company man type, impeccably dressed in blazers, turtlenecks, and Michael Caine As Harry Palmer specs. He’s married to Cate Blanchett as Catherine St Jean, equally stylish and calculating. George isn’t beyond keeping tabs on his colleagues and subordinates — he invites four of them over for dinner then spikes the broth with truth serum to figure out if one of them might be leaking information to the enemy. Soon the dirt is coming out about infidelities and kinks — though less about professional betrayal — and when the cast is this hot you’re all in: Tom Burke as serial philanderer Freddie Smalls, Marisa Abela as surveillance expert and steak-knife wielder Clarissa Dubose, Regé-Jean Page as too-handsome-to-live James Stokes, all spies, and Naomie Harris as Zoe Vaughan, in-house psychotherapist to all the agents.

But when another agent (Gustaf Skarsgaard) dies, and a dangerous bit of tech goes missing, it looks like, in fact, Catherine could be a traitor in their midst, which forces George to investigate her. Naturally, the conspiracy is layers deep, all under the nose of the guy in charge, a nicely cast Pierce Brosnan as Stieglitz.

Soderbergh is fond of utilizing new lenses, filters, and editing techniques depending on the project — he frequently directs, is camera operator, and editor on this films — which may explain some of how he’s able to be so prolific. This time out he’s applied a filter to create an effect that used to be called vaseline-on-the-lens — it creates a warm glow around light sources and a general smokiness to scenes, like we’re peering through fog. It’s a look I would’ve associated with Hammer Horror in the 1960s, but it actually works here to unify the film and its uneasy vibe, complemented by a cool and funky score from David Holmes, who also scored Soderbergh’s wildly successful Oceans 11. 

Also, a tip of the critical hat to this cast — Blanchett and Fassbender were born to work together with their wiry frames, razor cheekbones and angular jaws. Fassbender is fully back after taking some time away from the movies, and clearly happy to choose overlapping genre projects like this, The Killer, and the excellent spycraft series on Paramount+, The Agency.

Maybe the biggest surprise, however, is the solid work from the most inexperienced cast member — Marisa Abela was terrific in the otherwise so-so Amy Winehouse biopic, and here she delivers the spice, holding her own and more with her veteran cast mates.

I have complained in the past when Soderbergh, with his restless muse, seems more interested in the form of his features than the heart of his characters. Not here — this is a tricky, deeply entertaining genre film, a spy thriller that is firmly interested in why people do what they do — and the games of deceit and death they must play — while tying its audience in knots around the “black bag” parts of their lives, the stuff they can’t talk about, even with their colleagues or loved ones. Delicious.