Movie Review: Black Bag (2025)

Genre: Spy Drama  

Director: Steven Soderbergh  

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris, Pierce Brosnan, Marisa Abela  

Running Time: 94 minutes  

Synopsis: British counterintelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) has to find out which intelligence team member sold a top secret cybersecurity weapon to enemy agents. One of the suspects is George's own wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), the head of the signals division. Other possible traitors include up-and-comer James (Regé-Jean Page), satellite imagery specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela), staff psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris), and case officer Freddie (Tom Burke). George has to safeguard his marriage while deploying mind games and state-of-the-art surveillance to uncover the culprit.

What Works Well: An amalgamation of John le Carré and Harry Palmer with a dash of the Smiths, this is a mostly grim but sometimes wry spy whodunnit. Michael Fassbender elegantly channels Michael Caine and creates in George Woodhouse a cold-as-ice agent who made his legend destroying his own father (deservedly so). He now faces a moment of truth with his wife, having to rely on deep reservoirs of trust to counteract mounting evidence of guilt. All the suspects are adept at playing spy games, and director Steven Soderbergh gets into a groove of simultaneously presenting and casting doubt on all the necessary details. 

What Does Not Work As Well: The tone awkwardly oscillates between serious and absurd, and the dialogue is more glib than thoughtful. For a group of supposedly clever spies, way too many of these characters are bedding each other and losing control of their emotions and libido. 

Key Quote:

Clarissa: When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?



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Movie Review: The Wasp (2024)

Genre: Suspense  

Director: Guillem Morales  

Starring: Naomie Harris, Natalie Dormer  

Running Time: 96 minutes  

Synopsis: In London, Heather (Naomie Harris) is living a comfortable middle-class life but is frustrated with her inability to get pregnant and her increasingly inattentive husband Simon, who may be having an affair. She approaches her former school friend Carla (Natalie Dormer) and offers her a lot of money to murder Simon. The pregnant, penniless, and tough-as-nails Carla is raising three kids, and accepts the money-for-murder arrangement. But what starts out as a plan to kill a husband turns into a much more complex plot.

What Works Well: Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, this play adaptation drips with Hitchcockian intent. The cat and mouse game between Heather and Carla is filled with secrets, revelations, mounting psychological suspense, and unexpected twists, with stated intentions obscuring hidden motives. Flashbacks to the women's days as young students gradually fill in the blanks of their characters and relationship, revealing a complex power dynamic, incidents of bullying, and layers of victimhood driving present interactions.

What Does Not Work As Well: The plot leans on some flakiness and coincidences, and only works when certain decisions are made at exactly the right time. In retrospect, it's difficult to believe Carla's inability to recollect her school-era behaviour.

Key Quote:

Carla (to Heather): Are you sure you want him actually dead?



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Movie Review: 28 Days Later (2002)

A zombie apocalypse horror film, 28 Days Later is a creepy vision of societal collapse.

In England, animal liberation activists invade a lab to free captive chimpanzees and accidentally release a fast-spreading virus that causes rage, triggering an epidemic. 28 days later, bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma at an abandoned London hospital. Chased by zombie-like infected humans thirsty for flesh and blood, he is saved by the intervention of survivors Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark.

Jim insists on visiting his parents' home, then he and Selena connect with fellow survivor Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah. They pick up a radio transmission promising safety at an army checkpoint near Manchester, and head out in Frank's cab. After several close escapes they connect with Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and his small group of soldiers, but Jim and Selena's troubles are far from over.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland revitalize the zombie genre (although the term is never used) with a sparse, character-driven journey into a collapsed civil structure. 28 Days Later delivers a haunting vision of evacuated cities beset by marauding infected victims seeking fresh blood, with pockets of survivors left to fend on their own. Whether surviving another day to live in this nightmare is even worth the effort is a question posed early, Jim's parents finding a peaceful ending when all hope seems lost.

The zombies move quickly, and while the violence is often shocking, Boyle's jerky hand-held cameras and dark environs imply more than what they show. Not satisfied with revealing street-level horrors, Garland takes the story towards the essence of the human condition. The second half shifts gears a couple of times. First Major West and his men appear to provide refuge, but a twist awaits, initially outrageous but upon reflection most plausible in the context of men reverting to the laws of the jungle. The ability to kill in the name of living becomes a pressing reality.

The tangle with the military men adds thematic spice, but does create a movie-within-a-movie and takes the intense focus away from the core apocalypse story. The star-free cast helps to maintain dour concentration within the changing nature of the challenge, Cillian Murphy as Jim navigating the transition from courier to adept survivor with help from Naomie Harris' unyielding determination to do what it takes.

As the rules of chaos take hold, the abstract happenstance of who lives and who dies is a random variable. One drop of blood landing in exactly the wrong place is as much a cause for a machete attack as hordes of chomping zombies. With the virus easily representing the spread of any condition that corrodes social fundamentals and triggers anarchy, 28 Days Later is disturbingly cogent.



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Movie Review: Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom (2013)

A biographical epic of South Africa's revolutionary leader and ultimately President Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom is a warts-and-all recounting of a remarkable life.

The film chronicles key events experienced and shaped by Mandela (Idris Elba). Starting as an impassioned lawyer in the 1940s, he is spotted by leaders of the African National Congress fighting against the apartheid regime. Initially not interested, the introduction of additional laws to increase racial segregation followed by a massacre of innocent civilians in a black township turn Mandela towards activism, and he becomes a prominent ANC campaigner.

Mandela's frequent absence from home and womaning break apart his first marriage, and he soon falls in love with Winnie (Naomie Harris) who becomes his second wife. By the early 1960s the regime is increasingly brutal, and the ANC resorts to a campaign of violence. Mandela goes underground, but is eventually captured, tried and sentenced along with his key associates to life in prison on Robben Island.

Winnie remains active and is herself incarcerated and separated from her young children, and she becomes increasingly militant in her hatred of the regime. By the 1970s, an international movement to free Mandela starts to gain momentum, while South Africa is stifled by economic sanctions and starts to experience wide-scale street violence and economic misery.

Long Walk To Freedom best resembles Gandhi, with all the praise and pitfalls built into the comparison. Mandela's story is an earnest 146 minutes tracing the South African leader's transformation from idealistic but skirt-chasing lawyer to unifying and peace-promoting President, passing through 27 years of incarceration.

But in both form and construct, Long Walk To Freedom could have been made in 1982, and the storytelling stodginess that used to pass as epic is less tolerable more than 30 years later. Director Justin Chadwick magnificently recreates South Africa of the 1940s, and the dusty tension between the white ruling class and the majority coloured population creates electricity in most scenes. But otherwise the William Nicholson script, adapting Mandela's autobiography, is unable to elevate the material much beyond conventional biopic standards.

The middle act featuring life-in-prison for Mandela and his key ANC associates is particularly flat. Chadwick and Nicholson fail to capture any meaningful milestone moments, and the film becomes choppy, shifting to wife Winnie's struggles and militarization but without fully investing in her story.

The loss of momentum is key, as the final flourish is both undermined and prolonged. As the international movement to free Mandela gains momentum he is moved to more tolerable house arrest conditions. Power-sharing negotiations start with the ruling party, but the foundations for Mandela's defining principles guiding the talks are sketched-in at best.

However, the strength of the film resides in the subject matter, and Chadwick avoids any hints of a hagiography. With Idris Elba in robust form and benefiting from good make-up work supported by Naomie Harris transitioning from seductress to strong-headed leader, Long Walk To Freedom paints a vivid picture of a couple who changed a nation. Their relationship falls into the crevasse of forced separation and they are imperfect as individuals. But altering the course of history is rarely, if ever, perfect.

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Movie Review: Collateral Beauty (2016)

A drama with touches of humour addressing the consequences of personal loss and profound grief, Collateral Beauty is well meaning but excessively sententious.

In New York City, marketing executive Howard (Will Smith) is still in a deep depression two years after the death of his daughter. To try and cope with his grief he writes angry letters to the abstract concepts of Death, Love and Time. His business partners Whit (Edward Norton), Clare (Kate Winslet) and Simon (Michael Peña) are facing a deadline to sell the company, but cannot seal the deal without Howard, the majority shareholder.

In desperation the partners decide to hire struggling theatre actors to engage with Howard, either to snap him out of his funk or prove he is incapable of functioning. Brigitte (Helen Mirren), Amy (Keira Knightley) and Raffi (Jacob Latimore) agree to impersonate Death, Love and Time respectively. Howard does take the initiative to join a support group managed by Madeleine (Naomie Harris), while the hired actors learn that Whit, Clare and Simon are facing personal issues of their own.

Death is part of life, love persists despite everything, and time is precious and should not be wasted are universal themes straight from the bottom shelf of simplistic self-help pop-psychology. Collateral Beauty wears these concepts with utmost reverence, and weaves around them a saccharin story befitting the excessively maudlin mood.

The clunky plot is an excuse to construct the rickety device of actors impersonating abstract concepts and ambushing Howard in street-level interventions. And it's no surprise whatsoever when backstories are introduced for Whit, Clare and Simon to double down on the sappiness of Howard's ordeal and give the hired actors more people to fix, Hollywood style.

But it's not all totally bad. Director David Frankel, working from a spec script by Allan Loeb, has an embarrassment of acting riches at his disposal, and makes reasonably good use of the talented cast given the emotional immaturity of the material. The shortish running-time of 97 minutes is shared equally among the many of stars on display, and most of them get at least a couple of scenes to shine. Helen Mirren appears to have the most fun as a never-will-be actress romping through the role of Death.

The perfectly sparkling locations featuring New York City decked out for Christmas fit perfectly within the film's simplistically magical ethos, but Loeb's dialogue exchanges needed at least one more thorough polish to scrub away the many awkward artificialities.

Collateral Beauty tries to achieve a whimsical fairytale vibe, but lands firmly on the wrong side of cloying.

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Movie Review: Our Kind Of Traitor (2016)

A low-key spy thriller, Our Kind Of Traitor features a mildly interesting story but never fully engages.

Englishman and teacher of poetry Perry MacKendrick (Ewan McGregor) and his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) are in Morocco on vacation, trying to patch up their marriage. A burly Russian calling himself Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) insists on buying Perry drinks, invites him to a party, and arranges a friendly tennis game the next morning. Dima introduces Perry and Gail to his extended family and invites them to another party, where he reveals himself to Perry as the chief money launderer for the Russian mafia, and a changing of the guard means that Dima and his family are in grave danger.

Dima wants Perry to connect him to British Intelligence services, offering information about corrupt high-level British government officials in exchange for asylum for his family. Back in London Perry does connect with Hector (Damian Lewis) of the MI6. Under-resourced and lacking support from his superiors, Hector recruits Perry and Gail for a follow-up meeting with Dima in Paris, where Dima's enemies start to get suspicious about the tweedy Englishman hovering around their target.

The John le Carré book worked on the page, but this adaptation, directed by Susanna White and written by Hossein Amini, struggles to tease out cinematic anchors. The story features no central protagonist or theme other than the dense fog of corruption and careerism subsuming anything resembling morality. Despite good production values, dedicated performances, and a faithful tone, the film operates in a void that discourages caring.

Perry and Gail are barely sketched-in, their marital troubles only hinted at. Hector and his crew are all business. Dima's family are background characters with almost no lines of dialogue. The bad guys in the form of Prince (the head of the mafia) and all his goons are one-dimensional evil monsters in three-piece suits.

With Stellan Skarsgård in full-on effusive mode, only Dima comes across as a halfway interesting character, and the curious bond he forges with Perry is the closest White gets to creating a heart for the film. But even here there is trouble: it is difficult to imagine a man with Dima's resources, wealth and connections having to rely on a random encounter with an Englishman to forge his family's escape plan. And Perry's justifications for allowing himself to get sucked into the orbit of an admitted master criminal and killer are only half-convincing.

At least Our Kind Of Traitor attempts to be cerebral, with dialogue, plotting and low-levels of unease and tension displacing mindless action. But the message of pessimistic doom loses its bite in the absence of hopeful souls willing to endure the suffering.

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Movie Review: Moonlight (2016)

A coming-of-age drama, Moonlight is an unblinking look at growing up poor and black in America. The film delivers its message without lecturing, but loses its impact in a drawn-out second half.

The story of Chiron is told in three chapters. The first installment is set in Miami, where young boy Chiron (Alex Hibbert), known as Little, escapes bullying and his drug addicted prostitute mother Paula (Naomie Harris) by hiding in a derelict building. He is found by small-time drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali), who provides a father-figure presence despite Paula's protestations, while Juan's girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) offers a welcoming home environment.

In the second chapter Chiron (Ashton Sanders) is a youth attending high school and subjected to continuous bullying as he becomes increasingly aware he is gay. His friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) initiates a first sexual experience, but school bully Terrel (Patrick Decile) gets in the way of happiness.

The third episode starts in Atlanta, where the adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) has now adopted the nickname Black and Juan's lifestyle, but has to reassess his life when he hears again from Kevin (André Holland).

Directed and written by Barry Jenkins, Moonlight is a rough equivalent of Boyhood, but from the black, gay and underprivileged perspective. The film delivers a powerful message by saying little, allowing events on the screen to flow in a logical river of the abnormal normality defining Chiron's life. Jenkins effortlessly yet sensitively conveys what it means to grow up deprived of functional parents and in a ghastly neighbourhood.

The film is low key, slow and moody, the aesthetic dominated by the dark blues of night and grim greys of day, nothing in Chiron's landscape from child to adult hinting at any prospects for a lush, bright or positive life. The measured pace serves to highlight the pointed depictions of drug abuse and bullying.

But unfortunately the three chapters are sequentially and noticeably weaker. The film starts strong, Chiron's encounters with Juan carrying a genuine surrogate father-child resonance. The middle is middling, the routine high-school-life-is-hell theme offset by Chiron's burgeoning sexual awareness.

The third chapter is by far the weakest. The film slows to a meandering crawl, Jenkins wrapping up his story as an underwritten snoozefest where long silences are deployed, stretching the running time well past the story's capabilities. Plenty of mumbled, almost incomprehensible dialogue betrays the film's low budget and rushed 25-day production schedule.

Despite being only partially successful as a viewing experience, Moonlight is heartfelt and quietly sad, an essential story that should not need to be told.

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The Movies Of Naomie Harris

All movies starring Naomie Harris and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

28 Days Later (2002)

Miami Vice (2006)

Skyfall (2012)

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom (2013)

Southpaw (2015)

Spectre (2015)

Our Kind Of Traitor (2016)

Moonlight (2016)

Collateral Beauty (2016)

No Time To Die (2021)

The Wasp (2024)

Black Bag (2025)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.