‘Black Bag’ Review: The Couple That Spies Together, Rides or Dies Together

March 11, 2025

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What’s in the Black Bag?! (CREDIT: Claudette Barius/Focus Features)

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Running Time: 94 Minutes

Rating: R for Adults Talking About Their Adult Affairs, as Well as a Few Bursts of Violence

Release Date: March 14, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: George Woodehouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) are a happily married childless couple. But it’s a little complicated because they’re both spies and therefore can’t exactly always be 100% honest with each other. But somehow they’ve managed to make it work! It perhaps helps that they carefully cultivate relationships with some of the younger employees at their agency, even if things do occasionally get a little (or a lot) messy. When Kathryn flies out for her latest covert meeting, it looks like she might be turning treasonous, or perhaps it’s all a setup. So how far will George go to protect his wife, and is anyone foolhardy enough to stand in his way?

What Made an Impression?: Confusing, Until It’s Not: I’ve long since given up on trying to understand the plots of espionage movies, and the beginning of Black Bag didn’t do anything to change my mind. Instead, it felt like an homage to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that had me going, “Did the trailer just straight-up lie about this movie’s plot?” But then after about 40 minutes of finely deliberate setup, screenwriter David Koepp and director Steven Soderbergh finally showed their hands, and they had me going, “Ah, there are the stakes.” I won’t delve too much more into this point because much of the pleasure of Black Bag is that “a-ha” feeling. But let’s just say that Soderbergh has demonstrated once again that it pays to figure out what you want to do ahead of time and then go ahead and execute that plan.
Scenes From a Marriage: Are George and Kathryn #couplegoals? I’d certainly be happy to see that conversation play out in the wake of Black Bag‘s release. They undoubtedly have each other’s backs, and they also consistently give each other the benefit of the doubt. But on the other hand, they leave a bit of a trail of destruction in their wake, although that might say more about their profession than it does about them. And though they don’t have any kids, you can kind of think of the characters played by Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page as their stand-in children. But that interpretation makes things go a little wibbly-wobbly, as it probably isn’t the best idea for parents to subject their kids to a round of polygraph testing. And yet, that is something that indeed happens in this movie. In conclusion, George and Kathryn’s ultimate suitability as a couple remains uncertain, but their turns as Spy Daddy and Spy Mommy are finely fulfilled.

Black Bag is Recommended If You Like: Leather and wine

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Satellite Feeds

Does ‘Next Goal Wins’ Score Enough Goals of Its Own to Win the Game of Biopics?

November 13, 2023

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#GOALS (CREDIT: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Searchlight Pictures)

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Oscar Kightley, Kaimana, Uli Latukefu, Elisabeth Moss, Will Arnett, David Fane, Rachel House, Beulah Koale, Rhys Darby, Chris Alosio, Lehi Makisi Falepapalangi, Semu Filipo, Ioane Goodhue

Director: Taika Waititi

Running Time: November 17, 2023

Rating: PG-13 for A Few Mean Comments and Some Boobs Drawn on Someone’s Face

Release Date: November 17, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: The Soccer Gods Must Be Crazy! That could be an alternate title for Next Goal Wins. How else to capture the kooky cosmic destiny that paired Coach Thomas Rongen with the American Samoan national team? Based on the 2014 documentary of the same name, Next Goal Wins finds Rongen and the Boys from the Territory at the lowest point in their respective careers. That experience is a little different for the two of them, though, as Rongen (Michael Fassbender) actually has some experience on winning sides, whereas American Samoa has never scored a single goal in any of their games. In fact, they’re most famous for losing 31-0 in a 2001 match to Australia, the most lopsided result in international soccer history. They’re desperate for anyone to help move them in a more promising direction, so Rongen ventures out over the Pacific to the tiny American territory. He’s got plenty to teach them, but his resentment at the world threatens to get in the way of all that.

What Made an Impression?: Deep Hurting: For a film positioning itself as an uplifting feel-good sports flick, Next Goal Wins sure is filled with a world of hurt. When he’s not with the team (and even sometimes when he is with them), Thomas spends much of his time numbing his pain with alcohol, or complaining on the phone to his estranged wife (Elisabeth Moss). He also listens to voicemails from his teenage daughter, whom he’s apparently unable to contact. (Some viewers might be able to sniff out exactly why that is before the full truth emerges.) It might seem counterintuitive to put so much agony in a crowdpleaser, but it’s actually kind of essential. A tragic backstory can go a long way towards winning over the audience, and Next Goal Wins would be pretty disposable without it.
Sneaky Trans Visibility: There are already plenty of hooks in Next Goal Wins‘ premise, so I certainly wasn’t expecting the story of a transgender player to make its way in there as well. But Jaiyah Saelua really is a member of American Samoan soccer who also happens to be the first openly non-binary and transgender woman to compete in a World Cup qualifier. Non-binary actor Kaimana plays Jaiyah as a bit of a ditz on the field who’s more concerned about making sure that she looks stylish rather than putting in a consistent effort. But she’s tough and unsparing when cornered, which is about what you would expect for someone who joined the team before transitioning and continued to play after coming out. In Samoan culture, she’s known as a “fa’afafine,” which refers to a third gender or non-binary identity. Jaiyah’s is a type of queer story that’s particular to this setting, so it could very well resonate with potential viewers who’ve yet to see this sort of possibility.
A Perfectly Fine Trifle: Ultimately, Next Goal Wins isn’t revolutionary in any way, but it has a fine grasp of what it’s doing. This is a unique true tale that is going to get the right audiences cheering along to every step of American Samoa’s rocky-but-quirky soccer journey. At times it might get a little too quirky, particularly when writer/director Taika Waititi shows up as a dippy local priest who also serves as a one-man Greek chorus. But if you’re in the mood for some gentle culture shock and straightforward redemption, then Next Goal Wins has you covered.

Next Goal Wins is Recommended If You Like: Cool Runnings, Young Rock, Miracle

Grade: 3 out of 5 Losses

Is This One ‘The Killer’?

October 31, 2023

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Ooh, ahh (CREDIT: Netflix)

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, Tilda Swinton

Director: David Fincher

Running Time: 118 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: October 27, 2023 (Theaters)/November 10, 2023 (Netflix)

Sometimes an earworm gets stuck in my head for eternity, and a certain word will henceforth always trigger it without fail. So whenever I hear about a professional life-taker, I can’t help but be transported back to a high school dance routine that included a section set to the Ying Yang Twins’ “Shake,” specifically, its repeated lyric of “This one’s a killa.”

This is all just a windup to asking: could David Fincer directing Michael Fassbender in The Killer live up to my persistent memories of the Ying Yang Twins? Only about 18 years or so will tell for sure, but in the meantime it didn’t quite hit me square in the chest. It moved along nicely enough and got to where it needed to go, but I didn’t really feel like I was getting unforgettably poked memorably until Tilda showed up.

Grade: A Fitting Lack of Empathy

Best Film Performances of the 2010s

June 22, 2020

jmunney Best of the 2010s, Best of the Decade, Cinema , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

CREDIT: YouTube Screenshots

Back in April, I revealed my lists of the best podcasts, TV shows, TV episodes, albums, songs, and movies of the 2010s. I declared that that was it for my Best of the Decade curating for this particular ten-year cycle. But now I’m back with a few more, baby! I’ve been participating in a series of Best of the 2010s polls with some of my online friends, and I wanted to share my selections with you. We’re including film performances, TV performances, directors, and musical artists, so get ready for all that.

First up is Film Performances. Any individual performance from any movie released between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019 was eligible, whether it was live-action, voice-only, or whatever other forms on-screen acting take nowadays. For actors who played the same character in multiple movies, each movie was considered separately.

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Movie Review: ‘Dark Phoenix’ Plays It Way Too Safe by Both X-Men and General Movie Standards

June 5, 2019

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CREDIT: Twentieth Century Fox

Starring: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Jessica Chastain, Tye Sheridan, Evan Peters, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Scott Shepherd, Ato Essandoh

Director: Simon Kinberg

Running Time: 114 Minute

Rating: PG-13 for Getting Suddenly Violently Tossed About by Telekinesis

Release Date: June 7, 2019

I love the X-Men. They’re my favorite superhero team, and still, through it all, my favorite superhero movie franchise. They’ve delivered some dizzying cinematic heights but also some flicks that have driven me batty. So it pains me to say that Dark Phoenix did not make me feel much in the way of any strong emotions.

Some say that the X-Men series is burdened by tangled, contradictory continuity. I say it’s bolstered by it. Whereas other cinematic universes are careful to keep every little thread in line for the health of a sturdy timeline, the Merry Mutants traverse decades willy-nilly, tossing off whatever plotlines just aren’t working and cruising along with whatever’s exciting and vibrant, paradoxes be damned! Dark Phoenix doesn’t reject that approach, but it doesn’t embrace it either. It’s mostly content to tell a straightforward story, while occasionally throwing out some half-baked ideas. It’s a movie unstuck in time, instead of proudly giving the middle finger to any temporal concepts.

Dark Phoenix is clearly a labor of love. It’s the directorial debut of Simon Kinberg, who’s been with the franchise for over a decade, and it’s based on one of the most beloved comics storylines, in which telepathic telekinetic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) bonds with a super-hot cosmic force to become the most powerful creature on the planet, perhaps the whole universe. It’s a huge climactic big screen culmination that’s been promised to us for quite some time, but after seeing how it’s turned out, I mainly want to say: we would have been okay without this movie. Or maybe now just wasn’t the right time for it. It’s arriving hot on the heels of an X-Men movie whose title literally referred to the end of the world and another that said a fitting goodbye to a pair of iconic X-characters.

But it shouldn’t have been impossible for Dark Phoenix to be another rousing, revolutionary statement so soon after those conclusive paradigm changes. In fact, it would have totally been in keeping with this franchise’s always-moving-forward ethos. But that’s not going to happen when a climactic battle scene takes place in some random New York hotel or when Professor X and Magneto run through the same old rigamarole of bickering and then making a temporary peace. When the stakes are this high, you have to go for broke.

Dark Phoenix is Recommended If You Like: X-Men completism, if you gotta

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Firebirds

This Is a Movie Review: Bucking Concerns That It Would Be Derivative, ‘The Snowman’ Barely Even Qualifies as Storytelling

October 20, 2017

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CREDIT: Jack English/Universal Pictures

This post was originally published on News Cult in October 2017.

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rachel Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Val Kilmer, J.K. Simmons, Toby Jones, Chloë Sevigny

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Running Time: 119 Minutes

Rating: R for Snowman-Human Hybrid Tableaux

Release Date: October 20, 2017

The best part of The Snowman happens a few minutes when someone refers to Michael Fassbender’s lead character, “Detective Harry Hole,” by his full name. Shockingly, that is the only time we hear anybody say “Harry Hole” in its entirety. True, my enjoyment of that moment might be the most prurient form of punnery, and I probably won’t be able to convince who looks down upon crudeness and wordplay of its hilarity. But at least that name has personality, something which the rest of the film lacks entirely.

The Snowman’s poster reads, “MISTER POLICE. YOU COULD HAVE SAVED HER I GAVE YOU ALL THE CLUES.” The film itself acts upon the same instinct, essentially giving away the identity of the killer in the first scene. So clearly, the mystery is not the point of this ostensible mystery film. What then is it all about? Perhaps a deep (or at least shallow) dive into a murderer’s psychology? I imagine a fascinating dissertation could be written about a killer who carefully slices up his victims, builds a snowman after each kill, occasionally affixes parts of the victims into the snowmen, and always calls in a missing person report to alert the same detective to arrive on the scene just a little too late. But as for how it plays as narrative, well, the harsh Scandinavian winter must have made everyone too sleepy to craft any plot turns anywhere near compelling.

The Snowman is based on Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s novel of the same name, one of the many bestselling Scandinavian crime thrillers riding the coattails of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. One might imagine that a potential problem here would be falling into a trap of derivativeness, but The Snowman isn’t really a knockoff of anything, whether literary, cinematic, or otherwise. Instead, it is just a hodgepodge of elements that I cannot understand would be a part of any movie whatsoever. The cinematography is plain ugly, almost like specks of snow are constantly stuck to the camera lens. Then there is a whole subplot about Oslo’s bid to host the “Winter Sports World Cup,” which apparently exists because any press about the Snowman Killer cannot be allowed to distract from that bid. Maybe there is supposed to be a point here about government corruption, but it just comes off as narrative padding.

The Snowman’s greatest sin is stranding some very talented actors with absolutely nothing to do. It also calls into question the bona fides of its director, Tomas Alfredson, who had previously pulled off two solid adaptations (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). Maybe this is just a hiccup, though if so, it is a big one. On the other hand, I have not read the novel, so maybe the problem is with source material that managed to be inexplicably successful. But at least we have Val Kilmer as a suicidal investigator, who is strangely compelling, with a freakish appearance that can only be described as “Haggard Vampire.” After watching The Snowman, you’ll certainly be able to relate to his fatalistic outlook.

The Snowman is Recommended If You Like: Despairing About the Pointlessness of Life

Grade: 1.5 out of 5 Daddy Issues

 

This Is a Movie Review: Sequel-Prequel ‘Alien: Covenant’ Follows the ‘Prometheus’ Template and Adds a Few Bizarre Details of Its Own

May 15, 2017

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This review was originally published on News Cult in May 2017.

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz

Director: Ridley Scott

Running Time: 123 Minutes

Rating: R for the Usual Chest-Bursting Shenanigans

Release Date: May 19, 2017

When horror movies are successful enough to merit sequels, the follow-ups can either repeat the same scares or expand the mythology. They usually do both, with the latter generally growing in prominence as the series drags on, with the diminishing returns on the former become clearer and clearer. (They can also try to summon entirely new scares, but that is one of the most difficult tasks in all of moviemaking.) Ridley Scott’s Alien is pure horror, despite its sci-fi setting. When other directors took over for the first batch of sequels, their genres may have tended more towards action, but the mythology certainly blew out as well, what with cloning Ripley and hurtling hundreds of year into the future.

Now that Scott has taken back the reins, he has apparently decided that if crazy ideas are going to be the name of the day, he might as well underpin the franchise with his own peculiar philosophizing. Because otherwise, this would just be a rehash of intrepid spacefarers treading too far on the edge and getting ripped apart by lethally invasive extraterrestrials. That approach is not necessarily terrible, and Alien: Covenant does not avoid it entirely. Chest-bursting can no longer be as iconic as it was the first time, but it still packs a sickening kick, and there are other body parts to slice off and wear away with acid blood. And there are also some larger-scale action sequences, demonstrating Scott’s still vibrant eye for scale and knack for properly calibrating tension.

But Covenant truly excels when it gets weird. It bridges the gap, both temporally and thematically, between the original Alien and 2012 prequel Prometheus. The latter film started to answer the question of what made the original attack on the Nostromo possible, a question that nobody really ever asked. Covenant continues to answer the question, and while it is still unnecessary, the backstory on display is fascinating enough to justify itself.

The actors playing the human crew of the Covenant fulfill their duties, but it is android Michael Fassbender who is pulling the strings. Prometheus and Covenant are explicitly about creation myths and the limits of human ambition, and these fundamental themes of existence are represented and mercilessly toyed with by humanoid beings created by humans. Certain revelations come out squarely tsk-tsking against hubris, while other moments are more impenetrable with their messages. But that is no criticism. Traversing across the universe should be stunning, humbling, and mysterious, perhaps even to the point of incomprehensibility. What is the purpose, for example, of Fassbender teaching himself to play the flute? I cannot genuinely say that I know, except that it makes Alien: Covenant unforgettable.

Alien: Covenant is Recommended If You Like: Prometheus But Wish It Had Been Better, Even If You Thought It Was Good

Grade: 4 out of 5 Fingers

This Is a Movie Review: Assassin’s Creed

January 1, 2017

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assassins-creed-movie

In Assassin’s Creed the Movie, Marion Cotillard sends Michael Fassbender into the past by having him inhabit an ancestor of his. In premise and execution, it’s a lot like Wolverine being transported to his younger self in X-Men: Days of Future Past. So watching this movie gives me a sense of “Been there, done that” but also “This can be done well.” Also encouraging: the intricacies implied by the secret societies and the prison-like facility that is supposedly not really a prison. There are some sci-fi mystery concepts worth exploring here.

Unfortunately about halfway through, Assassin’s Creed confirms that it will not buck the trend of unimpressive video game adaptations. Plot developments, pieces of mythology, and new characters are introduced with little, if any, explanation. I suppose if you play the games you might have some semblance of understanding, but I have my doubts that such comprehension would actually improve anything.

I give Assassin’s Creed 200 “Why Are They in This’s?” out of 500 Shadowy Figures.