It is old hat to say that Steven Soderbergh’s movies are stylish, but a look through the auteur’s catalog inspires few descriptors that are more fitting. The director of 35 feature films since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh knows when to begin and end a scene. He understands what characters should wear and how production design can alter the mood of entire setpieces. Most importantly, he grasps how to pace a movie, a dying art in an age of bloated comic-book extravaganzas. Put these gifts together, and one gets Black Bag, the director’s finest effort since Out of Sight (1998) and a serious contender for best picture of the year. 

Black Bag begins as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the Vauxhall set. Instead of George and Martha, however, we have George and Kathryn, two British intelligence agents whose marriage to one another is at least as intriguing as dead drops and ciphers. Following a brief prologue in which a superior asks George to smoke out a mole, the pair host a dinner party for the prime suspects, two other couples whose romantic and professional motives have begun to blur. Though no one present kills an imaginary child, as Richard Burton did in the 1966 film, the party nevertheless crackles with a carnal energy that will have Edward Albee fans sitting up in their chairs.