It’s rare for a director to release two films in the same year, rarer still two films in the same quarter—and perhaps unprecedented that both should be so satisfying. Opening in January, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence (which premiered at Sundance in 2024) was a bright spot in a month notorious for being a hazmat zone of cinema effluvia; in my 4Columns review, I hailed the movie as “a taut, confident, superbly executed paranormal thriller” and “a genre film invigorated by astute, nondidactic social studies.” Switch out “paranormal” for “spy,” and the same words apply to Black Bag, nominally a tale of espionage and treason but, more piquantly, a dissection of heterosexual coupledom.
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