Black Bag (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

With each new project, I'm increasingly grateful that Soderbergh didn't retire after all. His latest release, a spy thriller like few others, reminds us of his highly entertaining ability to cover familiar ground in a wildly unfamiliar way. Black Bag manages to turn a high-stakes story about international security, satellite surveillance, and eavesdropping with AI, and turn it into a tense dinner table drama about camaraderie and companionship. David Koepp's riveting screenplay takes special focus on a conspiracy to leak a top-secret software called Severus, which could apparently cause a nuclear meltdown and claim thousands of lives.

MI6 officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is given one week to locate and stop the leak; he narrows his list to five suspects and invites them over for dinner. Perhaps I should say, rather, that he invites four over for dinner; the fifth suspect is his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), his personal and professional match in every way. The others include two couples, all British Intelligence agents of various temperaments and dispositions, and their dinner is a bit awkward; at least, it's a bit stilted and guarded between these folks with their stiff upper lips. But George has lightly drugged their meal to lower their inhibitions with the intention of getting someone loose enough to reveal their secret. One couple is fiery Freddie (Tom Burke), angry about not getting promoted, and satellite image specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela), who is his subordinate. The other is Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and the agency psychiatrist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris). Despite the revelation that Freddie has been cheating on Clarissa, causing her to stab his hand with her cutlery, and some fractures in their relationships generally, George learns nothing of value.

With less than a week to go, and with his own supervisor found mysteriously dead, George refocuses attention on his wife, resorting to secretive surveillance of Kathryn on one of her missions. Kathryn suspects their boss (Pierce Brosnan) of attempting to destabilize Russia at any cost, and leaks the Russian operatives' location to a CIA contact, resulting in their annihilation from a drone strike. Meanwhile, George issues polygraph tests to his suspects; based on their respective intel, George and Kathryn conclude that they are being set up and decide to host another little dinner party.

If you know me, you know I love a dramatized dinner party gone wrong. You don't often see these in espionage thrillers, but in this Koepp/Soderbergh project, we get two! As bookends of what is otherwise an engaging but somewhat rote spy story, these sequences frame the whole affair as one of intimate, psychological proportions. We get to know these characters as perfection-oriented, ambitious professionals and as socially icy Brits in what could be an awkward domestic setting. That drastically changes our opinions of them once the game is afoot. As we follow George, primarily, we see his calculated method of putting pressure on each suspect to try and elicit their secrets; Fassbender's typically masterful, subtle performance is key here in ensuring that we trust him without his having to say much.

As his second release this year already, Soderbergh is showing no sign of slowing down or of being predictable in his choices of cinematic topics. This film, understated as it can feel, nevertheless features speedy edits and cool camera tricks such as shifting focus mid-shot and dousing everything in soft lighting to create a unique visual appeal to the proceedings. This helps the dinner scenes best, making things feel natural and nice even as we wait for the traitor to erupt. It also helps us trust -- and then not trust, and then trust again -- George's relationship with Kathryn, as their sexual chemistry and cerebral gameplay are showcased only briefly but highly effectively. And despite her role as a sort of secondary character, Blanchett matches Fassbender point for point, performing Kathryn with a glamorous, ballsy delivery that makes the character have an edge you don't usually see in films like these. He lays a careful trap and waits for his prey; she will unapologetically push people to see which one takes the bait. The middle act of the film works because of Blanchett's choices: she is clearly the only character in the film who could actually be outsmarting George.

Koepp's fraught dialogue and Soderbergh's uncanny knack for unique genre twists combine here in a heady test of smarts that is over almost too quickly. I could have lived in this world a little longer. Brosnan is having fun as a former James Bond who is a bit insecure professionally, and Harris is particularly delicious to watch in her equally cerebral and emotionally complex position as the group's therapist. While the final reveal could delight or upset genre fans, it strikes a memorable balance of tonal uplift and satisfying closure that we don't often see in such films.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

Score: 3 / 5

We're all pretty familiar now with films adapted from video games, but how do you adapt a role-playing game? As co-writers and co-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (and co-writer Michael Gilio) capably demonstrate in Dungeons & Dragons, it's not all that different. You choose a specific story to tell, first off, and if it's original, so much the better. Of course you target the already existing fan base, and sprinkle in healthy doses of fan service in terms of insider knowledge and Easter eggs. You also need to be appealing to potential new fans, which can be done through casting choices, narrative accessibility, and marketing that doesn't alienate those unfamiliar with the material. Honor Among Thieves, a title which suggests Paramount's hopes for a new franchise, does these things.

While this is a big-budget, big-screen fantasy adventure in every sense of those words, and as such should be seen on the silver screen, I confess myself occasionally lost while watching. Not lost in that I couldn't follow the story, but lost because I'm pretty unfamiliar with the IP, and so the endless fantasy jargon used tended to slide in one ear and out the other. Seeing it with subtitles would have been ideal, as I wasn't always sure about the titles used (bard, paladin, rogue, druid, barbarian) or proper nouns (names and places are not obvious or familiar). Even when I did catch these elements, their significance often escaped me. Some of this may have been the result of sound editing, which often reduced key dialogue to indiscernible garble. 

Without these, though, the film is still a delightful romp, one that intangibly conveys the sense that it is making itself up as we go along, much like the real game. The main character, a bard named Edgin (Chris Pine) whose wife was murdered, takes his daughter and they become thieves with a ragtag troupe including Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) and Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), the latter of whom betrays them with his secret accomplice, a demonic Red Wizard named Sofina. After breaking out of prison, Edgin and Holga embark on a quest to build a new team, rescue Edgin's daughter, and save the land from Forge and Sofina, who want to rule with the power of a zombie army. It's a lot, and while the apparently unfocused narrative wasn't to my liking, I see how it pays homage to the wink-and-nod creativity of the game on which it is based.

To be honest, the whole experience made me feel a bit high. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but between a talking corpse answering questions not unlike the bridge-keeper in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a "fluffy" red dragon too big for its enclosure, and the generally frenetic CGI action sequences, I have a hard time now remembering what all happened in this bloated, overstuffed funhouse ride. For example, the undeniably beautiful Regé-Jean Page shows up, and I cannot recall who he played, why he was there, or what all he did. And I don't think that's entirely my fault. Even a bit of breathing room for the film, maybe via a narrator, to do some basic world-building would have helped me a lot. Then again, maybe I just need to see it with subtitles.

The Gray Man (2022)

Score: 1.5 / 5

It was just so boring, I couldn't stand it. The Russo brothers proved themselves immensely capable directors with several of the biggest entries in the MCU, but it seems several of their efforts since have struggled to do much at all. And maybe, due to its star power and big names, their latest will have a healthy viewership. But watchability and draw are very much not the same as enjoyability and artistic integrity, or even solid storytelling. It smacks all the more hollow because it's the first installment of what Netflix seems to hope will be a series.

Ryan Gosling plays Sierra Six, an assassin and spy working for the CIA. His handler is Billy Bob Thornton, and his new boss is Regé-Jean Page; they all have character names, but I didn't care enough to learn them. The story proper jumps right off from these brief introductions, as Gosling enacts his latest mission in Bangkok, taking out a target who is revealed to be a fellow agent. Much like in a Mission: Impossible scenario -- but not nearly as well-executed -- the target tells Gosling about his boss's criminality and provides evidence as he dies. Gosling immediately goes on the run as Page makes him a target in turn. But he's no Ethan Hunt or even John Wick, and frankly I just didn't care. Gosling is stoic and active, and the character is basically void of personality or motivation.

To stop Gosling, Page brings in an ex-CIA mercenary, Chris Evans, sporting a ridiculous mustache and a sociopathic streak. Page seems desperate, and Evans is certainly up to the task by any means necessary. Unleashed on Gosling, Evans is a wild card, resorting immediately to torture and kidnapping and murder. He's probably the most fleshed-out character in this film, but even he has only a handful of concrete character details. He's also not particularly interesting, just pretty to watch (except for that bizarre growth on his upper lip). I hoped when Ana de Armas showed up to help Gosling that she'd save us from these shallow men, but the film barely even recognizes her as a person and treats her like an even more shallow sidekick. The only other woman of much consequence in the film is Thornton's niece, the kidnapped girl, so our two prominent women are relegated to cringey tropes.

The film is occasionally beautiful to behold, but cinematographer Stephen F. Windon of Fast & Furious fame mostly makes the movie look dark, cold, and lifeless. You can't see half the action or most of the globe-spanning locations through the murky darkness. There is almost no sense of fun in the film, and maybe there doesn't need to be, but when it becomes a slog to continue, that's a problem. I actually stopped watching it the first time because I couldn't take it any more; I finished up the last half hour the next day, but frankly I wish I hadn't. What a waste of resources.