Michael fassbender

If you would like to see that rarest of endangered species — a smart, witty and original 90-minute thriller aimed at adults — then stop reading this review immediately and go and see Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. It is a film that is probably best enjoyed by going in entirely blind, where the bare bones of the premise, revolving around a husband-and-wife pair of British spies who find themselves under suspicion of treachery, possibly by one another, is all you need to know. Yet if you need further convincing, then rest assured that this a one-of-a-kind blend of Mission: Impossible, Private Lives and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith thrown into the mix, to season.

If you’re a Paramount+ or Showtime subscriber, there’s a decent chance that you spent at least some of the Thanksgiving break watching the first two episodes of The Agency, the Michael Fassbender-fronted espionage drama that the company has invested a huge amount of money in. Based on the cult French series The Bureau, starring Matthieu Kassovitz, it’s a grim and self-consciously serious piece of drama, low on explosive shootouts and one-liners and high on tortured scenes of introspection, as Fassbender’s deep-cover operative, codename Martian, is brought in from the cold by his CIA superiors to their London outpost, only to realize that he has not been entirely honest as to a tortured romantic liaison that he went through in Africa.

When David Fincher’s latest picture The Killer premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it was to a more muted reception than might have been anticipated. Part of this may have been because, with the actors’ strike very much in force, its stars Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton were nowhere to be seen, with Fincher himself the only A-lister on the red carpet. But it was also undoubtedly because the finished film was not remotely what many had anticipated. Early hype suggested that The Killer would follow the exploits of Fassbender’s anonymous assassin as he (inconveniently) develops a conscience, presumably setting up an existential quandary.

If you had to pick the two Hollywood directors who have been the most over-exposed in recent years, many people would opt for two idiosyncratic and hitherto likeable figures: Wes Anderson and Taika Waititi. The reason opinion has cooled on both filmmakers, however, in the past couple of years is that their work — which has often been excellent in the past — has become so stylized, and so constant, as to be exhausting. Anderson’s most recent movie, Asteroid City, was greeted with sighs and weariness, despite being a smash at the box office, and Waititi’s much-delayed picture about soccer, Next Goal Wins, has premiered at the Toronto Film Festival to general yawns of “predictable” and “seen it all before.

In the Nineties, David Fincher established himself as the cult director for a certain type of cineaste. After the misstep of Alien 3 (underrated, still not great), he came back triumphantly with the still-astonishing serial killer thriller Se7en, and then established his credentials with the millennial satire Fight Club. It was a box-office flop but attracted an immediate, fervent following who latched onto its director as a near-prophetic figure, capable of combining visual pizzazz acquired from his days as a music video director with a mordant, dark wit. He became one of those filmmakers who could simply be referred to by the initiated by his surname, like Scorsese or Spielberg.