If you're hosting a dinner for half a dozen British intelligence agents with the aim of ferreting out a mole, what should you cook?

For George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), who's preparing for four colleagues, plus himself and his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), who, like him, is a high-level operative, it's chana masala with a few drops of truth serum.

"Will there be any mess to clean up?" Kathryn asks her husband as they're getting ready.

"With any luck," he responds.

So goes much of the crackling patter of "Black Bag," Steven Soderbergh's delicious marital drama cloaked as a sleek spy thriller. Lean and taut, the 93-minute "Black Bag" is more a sizzling amuse-bouche than full-course meal, but it's simmered to perfection.

George and Kathryn, as fellow agents at London's National Cyber Security Centre, don't seemingly have what you might call a traditional marriage. Each has their own secret ops, leaving large swaths of their lives off limits to the other. When George asks where Kathryn is flying off to on Wednesday, she shrugs with a smile, "Black bag."

In the movie's opening scene – a slinky tracking shot that trails George into and out of a nightclub – an agent named Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgard) gives him the assignment to track down the mole, with the added wrinkle that Kathryn can't be dismissed as a possible suspect. A cyber-worm device called Severus that's capable of hacking into nuclear facilities has gone missing. The fate of the world, as it so often is, is said to be at stake.

But, really, the state of George and Kathryn's marriage is what interests us. Extreme though their situation is, their union is one that, like any couple, is built on trust and devotion, even if their professional... Read More