Black Bag

A smartly drawn spy tale. As sophisticated as a dry martini.

This movie is Smooth Soderbergh. It’s brisk, engaging, humorous, well-directed, written and acted. You can put your brain in low gear and sit back and be entertained.

Soderbergh handles ensemble casts well, forming a constellation rather than centering any single person as a lodestar.

Like Presence, it's an interesting genre exercise.

In reality, this London-set spy drama is a coolly paced affair that luxuriates in its own cerebral suaveness.

The cast of luminaries lend the thinly sketched characters distinctive personalities, but the real star is the technology of spycraft: Soderbergh grimly delights in exposing its eerie powers and potentially devastating uses.

Writer David Koepp and director Steven Soderbergh deserve a standing ovation for their commitment to economy in storytelling, economy in general being a very rare thing to be applauded for these days.

Its setup is quite intriguing. Its development is enticingly complex. Its conclusion is rather simple, but it so thoroughly delivers the tingles, that it still feels like a rousing success.

Black Bag is Soderbergh's best since claiming retirement a decade ago. It's so slick, and so cool, it takes me back to the Soderbergh of Out of Sight, Ocean's Eleven and Logan Lucky, while being nothing like those films as well.

Steven Soderbergh pushes the metaphor of the "black bag" to the limit.