Black Bag

Unauthorised Item
In The Bagging Area

Black Bag
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 2025
Focus Features
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Steven Soderbergh retired from directing in 2013. Since then he’s directed another 11 movies plus assorted TV shows and one can’t help but think that he’s more prolific now than before he made that statement. In fact, this is the second cinema release to be written by David Koepp and directed by Soderbergh this year and it’s only March (the first being Presence, released at the end of January and reviewed here).

And, like the aforementioned Presence, his latest opus Black Bag is absolutely brilliant. A startling and intense, emotionally claustrophobic thriller which seems to be an homage to the best of the cold war spy movies of the 1960s. I’ll give a couple of the references as I run through this review. .

The always interesting Michael Fassbender plays British intelligence agent (that’s spy to you and me) George Woodhouse, which is surely not a coincidental first name as a reference to George Smiley in a number of John LeCarre’s famous books (not to mention a character appearing in a number of movie adaptations of them). He is married to Kathryn St. Jean, a similarly high ranking spy who is played by the always amazing Cate Blanchett. Both are playing very muffled versions of themselves here, as two very cautious denizens of the global spy network. Both relying on the spy term ‘black bag’ as an area of their work lives which are off limits to talk about in their marriage, due to authorisation levels and ‘need to know’ status.

After hearing that one of five in his organisation is a traitor putting a huge number of lives at risk, with his wife being one of that list, George invites all the names to a dinner party at his and Kathryn’s home, with a little spiking of some of the ingredients, to loosen tongues and behaviour (a choice which leads to some more than inflammatory behaviour between the guests). These guests are played by Tom Burke, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page and the always brilliant Naomie Harris.

As the seeds of suspicion grow, the emotionally aloof and icy George starts exploring the twists and turns of the plot which features a device which could kill untold millions of people, called Severus. This includes suspicion and shadow thrown onto the head of the department, played by Pierce Brosnan. Shenanigans ensue and lovers of non-Bond sixties spycraft movies of the mostly British variety will love this suspenseful and well written thriller.

Well directed too, with Soderbergh directing, shooting and editing (using his mother’s name as a pseudonym) an intriguing concoction of thriller and ‘will he or won’t he shoot first and ask questions later’ style tension, as George moves ever closer to the solution of the problem (once he’s figured out that at least two people have been set up, including himself).

And it’s a damn near perfect movie, it has to be said.

The pre-credits sequence, filmed in a number of locations in London in one take (or appearing to be at least but, I suspect, just well staged and rehearsed and done in one take, as George arrives at a location and wanders a few floors of a busy bar until being led out somewhere else) with the camera firmly following George from behind, with his face hidden for this sequence.

Then, as we go into the credits, we see another major influence of the film as George prepares the meal in a way reminiscent of Michael Caine’s breakout role of Harry Palmer in The IPCRESS File, the first of his three movies playing the nameless character from Len Deighton’s famous spy novels. George even wears the exact same type of NHS spectacles which were synonymous with the Harry Palmer personality throughout the entirety of this movie. Soderbergh just couldn’t resist wearing his influences on his celluloid-like sleeve here.

The actors are all incredible in this, with an actress I don’t know, Marisa Abela, being particularly stand out as a young recruit who is perhaps a little too sensitive for the brutal world of international espionage. And she plays perfectly in a film which is, to be fair, only using the genre trappings of the spy movie to explore the depths of deception, loyalty and trust inherent in relationships, especially those in the spy game where the ‘black bag’ manifestation can be seen as a fallback to cover a multitude of sins, such as hiding a sexual affair.

Indeed, this is further explored in a scene which crosscuts between multiple subjects in a polygraph test.* A sequence which has been done to death in so many movies by this point that it’s become a very obvious cliché but, luckily for the audience, is executed to perfection here and which even gives some of the characters a little more depth than they had before this scene.

The ruse of the ‘gun on the table’ game towards the end of the movie will not surprise many people in the audience as to the intent of such an item on an open table but in terms of the surface story revelations as to the identity of the traitor in the ranks, it may well come as a surprise. Just like an Italian giallo trying to remain inscrutable by throwing motives at every single member of the cast, the traitor in this one could be anyone... even George. So when the traitor is finally revealed, coupled with the fortification of one character deciding not to kill that person when they had the chance to earlier in the film, it is somewhat surprising but, by that point there’s not much at stake in terms of the ultimate identity of said treacherous individual. And the film has a nice little punchline in terms of the secretive personal motivations of other characters in the narrative.

So there you have it. Black Bag gives us a  brilliant set of performances in a well written and directed motion picture which includes a very nice score by David Holmes, sadly not available on a proper CD at time of writing. This one is a full-on recommendation from me, especially for those lovers of cold war thrillers from days gone by. 

*Fun fact: The original lie detector test was invented by Professor William Moulton Marston who created and wrote the Wonder Woman character for comics in the 1940s. It's also why she has a 'rope of truth'. For more information, see my review of Professor Marston And The Wonder Women right here.

Red Sparrow

Nate N’ Sparrow

Red Sparrow
2018 USA Directed by Francis Lawrence
UK cinema release print.

Red Sparrow is a Cold War spy thriller based on a novel, the first part of a trilogy, by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews. So I guess you can certainly say the writer of the source material knows where he’s coming from in terms of the nuts and bolts operating procedures used in the story and this certainly, I think, comes through in the filmed version.

Now before I go any further, I have to say that I went into this movie knowing it was pre-cut for release in the UK... which is something I almost never humour or entertain. However, the trailer really intrigued me so I made one of my rare ‘window shopping only’ cinema trips. If I liked this ‘selected highlights’ version of the movie then I would buy the full, uncut version from the US market when it comes out on Blu Ray. Which I will be doing, as it happens. However, I really wouldn’t consider the UK presentation the same as being able to actually watch the movie itself. Why? Because I consider even a single frame (one 24th of a second) excised from a movie to be an incomplete edition and not the full work of art. I remember well the old late 1980s TV showings of Blade Runner (reviewed here) where, just the removal of one single swear word totally changed the underlying atmosphere of a specific scene and gave a different emotional hit from it. So... no... watching a movie with cuts is not the same as watching the actual film and I’m both ashamed and offended that censors in this day and age still exist. And I am certainly not giving any respect to the studio who released this and allowed it to be cut just to get a lower rating. Forget the money, guys, it’s about the art... let it lose money, it’s not that important. Art is more important. Entertainment is art and art is not a business. I know that’s a totally naive and less than credible thing to say about the Hollywood money machine but I don’t care... unless we strive to reach that ideal then we’ll never, ever get there.

So anyway... Red Sparrow is not the film I was expecting it to be.

It looked, from the trailer, like an edgier version of the film the Marvel Black Widow movie... if that ever sees the light of day... should be but, although it certainly is edgier than I would imagine Marvel would let their Natasha film be, this one isn’t an ‘action’ thriller by any sense of the expression and if you’re looking for a ‘high octane’ guns and explosions kind of movie, you’re definitely in the wrong place.

This film is actually a proper spy thriller.

It has an edge to it for sure but it’s more like a brutal version of something that John Le Carre or Len Deighton might have written so, oh yeah, I’m definitely a big fan of this film (or what little I saw of it... one of the cuts made is clumsy and obvious so I'm looking forward to seeing the ‘Jean Rollinesque’ pay-off to a certain, early sequence in the film).

Jennifer Lawrence is an actress who impresses me more and more with every film I see her in. I didn’t see her Hunger Games films by the same director (who is no relation to her, despite the surname) because the Young Adult nature of the source material put me off but everything I have seen her in, I have sat up and taken note. I hated Aronofsky’s Mother! (reviewed here) for example but, even in that, you can see what a great and dedicated performer she is and my respect for her deepens with Red Sparrow because, well, it’s a really brave part to take on and she really runs with it. Considering you have some real acting heavyweights in the cinematic ring with her on this one, such as Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling, she does a really good job and more than holds her own. Watching her career now with a lot of interest.

The film is about her character, Dominika Egorova, once a world famous ballet star but now recruited, due to circumstances I won’t spoil here (even though they’re on the trailer), to the secret government division of agents code named the Red Sparrows. It’s specifically about a plot concerning US intelligence operative Nate Nash (played by Joel Edgerton) and the identity of a Russian mole he is trying to keep secret. The film tells the story of the grey areas where the lives of these two agents overlap and penetrate each other. It raises the obvious questions about whether Dominika is committed to the Russians or whether she is really helping the Americans and, any weaknesses in the story come, I think, from the writing more than anything else. For instance, there’s a scene where you will definitely find out one way or another, whose side she is on  but I was pretty sure the way it has been set up to make you think the opposite of the truth of the situation was, in itself, giving the game away. Another slightly problematic thing is the identity of the mole, who I was pretty sure I had guessed correctly from the outset and when the reveal came later... again, it was the obvious choice. That being said, there is a nice bit of shenanigans with that character right near the end of the film where Dominika pulls her own trump card which is a moment I didn’t quite see coming... although it makes perfect sense with the way the recruitment of her character is pitched at the start of the piece.

However, these little obvious things really don’t stop this movie from being a tight spy thriller and I really enjoyed this one a lot more than some of the other, recent attempts to juggle the expectations of ‘action thriller’ as opposed to ‘spy thriller’ in modern cinema. There’s also some really great stuff going on with the way the film is put together too... asides from the nude scenes with Jennifer Lawrence which, of course, are already leading this movie into ‘great’ territory. ;-)

For instance, there are some nice things done with the sound in certain sequences, such as the boiling sound of a whistling kettle transmuting into the squeak of an opening door in the next scene. Also, the crosscutting of the plot set up with Nate and the introduction of Dominika’s character in the pre-credits sequence, long before either of these characters meet in the chronology of the story, is handled really well and could have gone completely wrong but it’s edited very competently and doesn’t lose the atmosphere of two things coming to a simultaneous, mini climax.

Another thing the director seems to like to do is to set up expectations of a sequence by showing you what happens with a different character earlier in the film and then upending that expectation the second time around. Such as showing the presence of another character’s nasty demise in a similar situation before leading up to it again with a slightly different denouement. This is something which another great spy thriller, The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed by me here), does in its opening phone booth sequence, setting the audience up for a similar moment much later in the film. In Red Sparrow, this technique almost takes on metatextual proportions when one of the characters uses a video of a sequence to deliberately foreshadow the possibilities of ‘what comes next’ to one of the other characters in an interrogations scene. So the film really wears its foreshadowing on its sleeve here and demonstrates an awareness of how those same, subconscious tricks used on the audience can also be brought into play in the context of the movie itself.

Another thing which got me into the cinema to see this was the promise of a new James Newton Howard score. This composer has grown on me over the years and my appreciation increased after I saw a London concert last year. This isn’t, as I’d initially expected, in the same kind of mode as his excellent score for Salt (movie reviewed here) but is a much slower score with a lot of Russian flourishes (or possibly the Westernised perception of Russian musical phrases) peppered into the mix. I suspect it will take me a few stand alone listens to fully get into but it will be getting a proper CD release at the end of the month so I will, at least, get a chance. There’s some stuff in it, especially in a later scene where Dominika meets Nate in his apartment, which plays out like something Bernard Herrmann might have written for it so, yeah, definitely looking forward to the physical release and it certainly works in the context of the movie itself.

The film has a wonderfully ambiguous ending too. I am in no way spoiling it but, now that I know the source material is a trilogy of novels it certainly makes more sense that things aren’t so ‘spelled out’ for the audience and I can only hope (although somehow doubt) that the director and actors reunite for two sequels. Time will tell, I guess.

Red Sparrow is definitely a solid recommendation from me, especially to fans of spy movies which don’t just limit themselves to the action packed confections of the James Bond or Jason Bourne movies. A proper espionage thriller with a very cold sting to it and something which deserves to do a lot better at the box office than I expect it to. Absolutely go and see this one because it’s rare these days that movies like this are let out the gate, so to speak. Stupid plot holes for sure (like how can a world famous ballerina go under cover by dying her hair blonde?) but a top notch thriller, nonetheless.

Bridge Of Spies

Spy Society

Bridge Of Spies
2015 USA
Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

So once again we have a Steven Spielberg movie which stars someone who I believe is fast becoming a frequent collaborator of his, Tom Hanks. Hanks is one of those rare cases, for me, when I actually spotted him as a talent to be watched way before he ever got famous. Back in 1982, which is the last time I saw it (and I wish it wasn’t), I watched a TV movie called Mazes And Monsters which starred young Tom as a man whose Dungeons And Dragons gaming had caused a malfunction in his brain. He started confusing the game for real life... or something like that. Forgive me, it’s been a long time. I remember liking it so much that I read the source novel it was based on and also told my friends to look out for this guy called Tom Hanks because he could really act. Two years later he made Splash and it didn’t take long before his name was synonymous with quality acting and, due to some sound career decisions, quality movies.

I’m not the best lover of some of the material he’s been in but I still, to this day, think Hanks is an incredible performer and, whether I like his films or not, I always find that his presence lifts whatever he’s in. A truly great actor and, to boot, with a public persona that makes him someone you really wouldn’t mind hanging out with at a pub on a Saturday night, perhaps.

Bridge Of Spies is no exception but it also, of course, comes with the seal of competence that Spielberg, again... whether I agree with his choice of subject matter or not... brings to all of his work as a director and producer. He makes films which are so well put together that you know that, whether you are going to have a really great time with his movie or not, that the very least you will get is something compelling in the way it is shot. Something which isn’t dull.

Bridge Of Spies is certainly never dull and, since Spielberg knows how to use his toolbox of cinematic syntax so well, it turns out to be an extremely entertaining movie. It’s not exactly a dynamic movie, although it does start off with a very gripping sequence which is like a toned down version of something you might expect to see in The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed by me here). That is to say, it starts off with a classic set of sequences featuring a spy and the people trailing him before he makes his escape and is then raided at home, quietly destroying as much evidence as he can right under the noses of the people sent to arrest him.

So, yeah. Maybe not dynamic but certainly very interestingok and Spielberg’s use of some amazing compositions, many of which section various characters off into their own little compartments in the way the frames are split by scenery and objects, is brilliant throughout the running time of the movie. The shots are leisurely and slow for the most part but, because Spielberg is so gifted with making things look perfect visually, well... like I implied earlier... you’re certainly not going to get bored with this one. The film is almost two and a half hours long but you probably won’t feel that it is.

This ‘inspired by a true story’ tale is fantastically put together as we see Tom Hanks character defend a real life Russian spy with a Scottish accent (which is apparently as it was in the real circumstances) and also negotiate an exchange for the Russian for two US prisoners or varying interest to the US government. As you would expect, you get as fine a performance from Tom Hanks and his co-stars in this picture as you would expect and special mention must go to Mark Rylance playing the ‘unworried by possible death’, laid back spy whom Tom Hanks develops a friendship with. It’s good stuff and, though it’s not an action movie it's... well, like I said before in reference to Spielberg’s movies... it’s compelling. It also helps that, while it’s a dialogue heavy movie, Spielberg is one of those few directors who understands that silence is golden and will leave a character to contemplate things in a way which almost allows the audience to pick up on their thought processes without having to have it spoon fed in the narrative. It harkens back to the days of silent cinema to an extent and with someone like Hanks at the helm in terms of the acting stakes... you know you are going to get something very crystal clear coming through to your spectators. There’s a wonderful shot near the end of the movie where Hanks sees some kids climbing fences from the train he’s on and you realise just what he’s thinking about due to the visual metaphor of the shot echoing something far more dramatic you see earlier in the movie. No words are used to bolster or spell out this moment... most people will surely ‘get it’ though.

One slight criticism I have with the movie is Thomas Newman’s score. Now this is one of the very few times that Spielberg has not teamed up with John Williams to provide music for his art. My understanding is that Williams was fitted with a pacemaker this year and couldn’t keep up with scoring both this movie and the new Star Wars movie (reviewed by me here) and so was forced to drop this one. Newman’s score is certainly serviceable and kinda appropriate in the places it’s used but... I dunno, maybe I’m just being biased here but I didn’t feel it was anything more than appropriate. It didn’t feel out of place but it didn’t feel to me like it was adding any lift to the movie either. As a stand alone listen it’s probably pretty cool but it just felt a little ‘off’ to me, I would say. There’s actually very little music in the movie, it has to be said. The way the thing is spotted is such that there are lots of long passages, it seemed to me, with no score in it whatsoever... so I wonder if that would have been the case if Williams was involved or not. I guess well never know and Newman certainly doesn’t let the film down too much, I think... I just didn’t experience the emotional pull I was expecting in some scenes... at least not from the music.

All that being said though... Bridge Of Spies is a very fine film. It’s not something I could watch again anytime soon but it’s a quality product and I think it deserves to be seen as much as anything else out there at the moment. Spielberg and Hanks are both masters of their art and this film is absolutely no exception. If you’re a fan of cinema, you really should go and see this one if you get the opportunity. Not the best film from either Hanks or Spielberg but certainly something which will probably linger with you a while after you leave the cinema. Don’t let this one pass you by.

Doctor Who - Cold War

Icing With Death

Doctor Who - Cold War
Airdate: 13th April 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: Frosty spoilers lurking dangerously beneath the surface.

When I was a kid, there were three big monsters in Doctor Who and the rankings were mostly based on their recognition to the widest majority of people as harbingers of creepy menace and possible death in the show... and they went like this...

The number one enemies, of course, were The Daleks... who had been with the show since the second story of the very first series. The second most recognisable characters were, of course, the half-man, half-machine Cybermen, who had passed time with the show since the very last Hartnell story and who had turned up a lot in the Troughton years (curiously, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor only ever encountered the cybermen once, as a bit of a throwaway sequence in the anniversary story The Five Doctors... but the target novelisations were big in the 70s and kids really did know who the cybermen were... in no uncertain terms).

The third most recognisable “enemies” from the show, just a little ahead of The Master, the Sontarans and th Ogrons, were The Ice Warriors, who started out life appearing opposite Troughton’s Doctor a number of times and then continued into the Pertwee era with the two serialised Peladon stories, The Curse Of Peladon and The Monster Of Peladon. That last story dates from 1974 and, actually, that’s the last time we’ve properly seen them since then in anything other than a quick, flashback reference... almost 40 years ago (although the Tennant era story The Waters Of Mars does have some slight references to them both in dialogue and the partial look of the antagonists in that story, to be fair).

And then, last year (seemingly a fair few months before the story was showing up in the news... I don’t know how that happened), a friend of mine told me that they were bringing them back for the 2013 series of Doctor Who.

To be honest, I was kinda split in how I felt about that.

One of the things I’ve really not liked about the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who is that a couple of the redesigned alien creatures (or let’s call them monsters, shall we) have been absolutely terrible compared to their original incarnations. The Silurians, for example, though much more facially expressive than their Pertwee and Davison era incarnations, are pretty rubbish designs in comparison. And even the Daleks got kind of knobbled and turned into something much less scary and unwieldy in Matt Smith’s first season... so I really haven’t trusted the people behind the most recent production team on the show to really come up with a decent redesign. That finally changed, however, when I saw a photo of the new design a few months ago and thought it looked... well, pretty good actually. Looking much less like something they’ve wanted to downright change and back into the realms, again, of something they just want to tweak and improve a little for modern audiences of the show (the new Zygon design for the 50th anniversary story of the show to be broadcast in November also looks pretty good too, I have to say). Although the lack of hair at various joints bothers me just a little.

And now the episode is finally upon us, written by Mark Gatiss who I find a bit hit and miss on these things... and it was actually a pretty good episode.

Set entirely on a Russian nuclear submarine in the early 80s, the episode deals with a thawed out Ice Warrior (yeah, okay, they started off back in Troughton's time as a reference to The Thing From Another World and Gatiss uses that here as a nice little reference), a once great hero of his people who has been stranded in the ice for 5000 years and who wants, after he has been attacked by a jittery human, to wipe out the planet... lucky he just happens to be on a nuclear sub then.

The episode is nicely claustrophobic with The Doctor and Clara just happening to land on the submarine just as the “monster of the week” wakes up. The tension between these two new additions to the crew and the Russians is all quickly forgotten as The Doctor takes charge of the situation, with allowances for a few mistakes by the Russians along the way.

There were some good things about this week's story such as some overly enthusiastic red and green lighting in certain scenes, which looked like the BBC had hired Mario Bava and Dario Argento to work on the episode and, this weeks installment did indeed have a couple of big time movie actors amongst the crew of Russians... namely David Warner and Liam Cunningham. The real eye opener, though, was the neat trick of revealing that the Ice Warriors as we usually see them are actually clothed in armour (something which could be seen as something of a contradiction in some ways since, in the old days, they did occasionally wear helmets over what we are now told is their armour) and then having the armour open up and “something” getting out and running amok. We only ever see its hands and, for a little while, it’s head... but this is more than enough to keep things scary and I’m sure Gatiss and co are not exactly unaware of how much like George Pal’s martians from his 50s movie version of H. G. Well’s War Of The Worlds this level of the "reveal" is and how it will affect the audience. Very creepy and appropriate for an episode of Doctor Who, I must say.

There were, however, a couple of clunkers in the episode too... as far as I could make out.

Number one is... why have the captain ban The Doctor from going to talk to the Ice Warrior and instead have his new companion do it with The Doctor talking through a headset? Yeah, okay, I know... for dramatic reasons. But, honestly... it made no sense.

Second gripe is... the TARDIS disappears to get itself out of trouble almost immediately at the start of the episode, stranding The Doctor and Clara in the submarine with the Russians and their new martian acquaintance. However, it relocated to the opposite pole of the planet so... how the bleepity bleep bleep was it still able to translate The Doctor and Clara into perfect Russian for the crew and vice versa? We’ve certainly not been told that the translation circuits (or whatever they're called) have got anything like that kind of range before. I’d just assumed when it disappeared at the start that it was lurking somewhere close... so that was either a bit of an oversight or carelessly insulting the intelligence of the audience as far as I’m concerned. That element of the plot seemed a little lazy to me, truth be told.

But, honestly, I’m kinda just nit picking here. It was a pretty great episode of Doctor Who (which is not bad considering how “Series 7” has been playing so far both last year and this year), so I’m thrilled we got another good one out of it and, also, very clear evidence that the Ice Warrior is not alone and that his race are all still alive and kicking. So I’m sure they’ll be back in their droves either in the last episode of this series or perhaps as one of many sets of aliens (possibly) in the 50th anniversary story when it airs. Time will tell.

In the meantime, next weeks episode looks nice and “old school” spooky so I’m looking forward to that one now, too.  But as far as greeting an old foe back goes... it was “Ice to see you”.