Black Bag (15)

Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp have made a delicious spy film that features gadgets, guns and glamour, but also leans heavily into marital melodrama.

Thirteen years into his “retirement”, Soderbergh is still cranking out one cracking film after the next, this time it’s a London-set, John le Carré-esque caper. We follow the turtlenecked George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), an icy operative in a British espionage agency. George’s boss, played by Pierce Brosnan (in surely a nod to 007), tasks him with discovering who has leaked to the Russians an important security device, and weed out the traitor.

George, with his fellow agent and wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) host a dinner party for the suspects, who are to be covertly fed a truth drug which results in a outpouring of suspicious craziness from: Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Zoe (Naomie Harris), James (Regé-Jean Page) and Freddie (Tom Burke). But what if Kathryn, to whom George is so eternally devoted, is the rat?

This is a richly rewarding thriller, which applies Soderbergh’s well-trodden heist mechanics to espionage with slickly rewarding results. If you’ve been enjoying the recent Slow Horses series in particular, this is an unmissable experience.