Black Bag review: Michael Fassbender leads a cool, taut spy thriller

Steven Soderbergh remains one of the most prolific filmmakers in Hollywood, as Black Bag is already the director’s second 2025 new movie (following Presence) and his sixth movie since 2020. To be honest, I’ve found myself siding more with general audiences than other critics in the surprising divide on liking Soderbergh’s recent output. That has changed with the sharp, taut and suave spy thriller Black Bag.

Soderbergh once again directs a script by David Koepp (the two have collaborated on Presence and Kimi in the last three years) to tell a story about intelligence agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) as he is tasked with finding a traitor in his organization that has stolen a device that could cause nuclear devastation. He has five primary suspects, one of which includes his wife, master spy Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). Rege-Jean Page, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris and Pierce Brosnan also star.

While the missing nuclear device serves as the macguffin for Black Bag, the movie is truly about the interpersonal relationships between the characters — their desires, the lies they tell each other and realizing just how far you would go for someone before turning against them.

To depict that, Black Bag does away with any kind of action or chase sequence (save for one instance, but it’s far from a Mission: Impossible type moment). Instead, the most intense scenes take place sitting around a dinner table with the characters just talking. It works because of the great combination of Soderbergh’s direction, cinematography and editing (he once again pulls triple duty) and Koepp’s sharp dialogue and intriguing characters. The only downside to this is that the stakes of the movie can feel small (despite the threat of thousands of innocent lives lost), but how these characters interact is plenty entertaining enough.

Of course helping bring Koepp’s characters to life are the actors, highlighted by Fassbender and Blanchett. Fassbender’s George — who feels like a nod to John Le Carre’s George Smiley — is cold and calculating, with the actor playing him almost as a robot; that’s all the more effective when there’s a moment he briefly loses control and we see the panic on his face. Blanchett, meanwhile, has the fun, sexy and mysterious role, which she absolutely nails. Together, Fassbender and Blanchett are phenomenal and create a dynamic on-screen power couple worth remembering.

The rest of the supporting cast are all solid, with Abela and Burke being my personal standouts, though Page, Harris and Brosnan all have their moments.

It is also worth mentioning that the movie has a runtime of just over an hour and a half, which feels like a rarity these days. The benefit is that there is no waste in this movie. Every scene is important for moving the plot along and revealing something about the characters.

A small bugaboo that I just couldn’t get out of my head came with the score — it kept making me think of Ocean’s Eleven. That perhaps shouldn’t be surprising, as the Ocean’s franchise composer David Holmes served in the same capacity for Black Bag. It doesn’t hurt the movie at all, for me it was just a weird thing that I couldn’t get out of my head whenever the score came in, taking me a bit out of things.

Even so, Black Bag is a gripping spy drama that will keep you guessing and feels sleek and cool like many of Soderbergh’s fan-favorite movies (the Ocean’s movies, Out of Sight). It is indeed one of my favorites of his in some time.

Black Bag releases exclusively in movie theaters on March 14.