Tag: Tom Burke

Review: Black Bag

By the time you finish this sentence, Steven Soderbergh may have released another film. Since ending his so-called retirement nearly a decade ago, the ever-prolific filmmaker has delivered over a dozen features and several television projects. BLACK BAG follows Presence as his second film of 2025—and it might just be one of the year’s best so far.

With a screenplay by David Koepp—who recently collaborated with Soderbergh on Kimi and Presence—this spy thriller appears deceptively simple at first. George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) are a married spy duo working for the British government. When a top-secret asset vanishes, George is tasked with rooting out a mole—who may very well be his wife.

Koepp sets this twisty tale in motion with an almost stage-like economy, beginning at a dinner party in George and Kathryn’s stunning London home. (It’s truly gorgeous—clearly, I’ve chosen the wrong career). The guests are two pairs of colleagues: Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela) and Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), along with Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris) and Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page). They’re also couples—and all are suspects.

Like George himself, Soderbergh’s lens oscillates between cool detachment and uncomfortable intimacy. After all, he’s a master of this kind of up-close grilling, a skill he’s honed since his 1989 debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. As the opening dinner party spirals into a bloodier take on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it cracks open a warehouse of secrets—ones that Koepp and Soderbergh spend the rest of the taut runtime sifting through.

What truly sets BLACK BAG apart from other spy dramas is its stellar cast. Fassbender plays George as a closed book, revealing only flickers of his relentless pursuit of the truth. Blanchett, by contrast, brings a charged energy that crackles in their scenes together. The only thing that smoulders more are the withering looks of disdain spy boss Pierce Brosnan casually drops whenever an underling displeases him.

To say much more would be criminal—it’s best left sealed in the titular black bag. From its quiet moments to its nerve-shredding climax, BLACK BAG is a slick, sophisticated thriller that knows exactly how long to stick around.

2025 | USA | DIRECTOR: Steven Soderbergh | WRITERS: David Koepp | CAST: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 13 March 2025 (Australia), 14 March 2025 (USA)

March 12, 2025
Review: Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga

When Mad Max: Fury Road came roaring back onto screens in 2015, it reminded us of two very important things. First and foremost, George Miller’s power as a visual storyteller was accelerating. That, and Australia has long been the perfect backdrop for a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Watching FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA at the premiere in early May at the magnificent State Theatre in Sydney, that local connection was tangible. From the presence of the cast and crew, including Chris Hemsworth in his first local film to date, through to cheers as familiar names and faces appeared on screen, it was a screening that arguably disproved the tall poppy syndrome we in the Antipodes wear like a badge of honour. Shot in the NSW towns of Hay and Silverton, it’s been almost four decades since Mad Max has felt quite this home grown.

Set several decades before the events of Fury Road, young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is taken by a Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus (Hemsworth). Growing up in this harsh environment, she is soon embroiled at the centre of a war for a citadel run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme).

The difficulty faced by all prequels is that we already know how it all turns out. Charlize Theron’s Furiosa arrived on screens as a fully-formed character, eclipsing even Tom Hardy’s tortured soul on screen. (Indeed, Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris had extensively scripted Furiosa’s backstory for Theron to draw on). Yet this is George Miller and there’s very little chance that you won’t feel the burn of his pacing or go over old ground – even over the course of 148 minutes.

Stylistically matching much of Miller’s previous series entry, the first shock comes with the sheer amount of green we see in the ‘place of abundance’ glimpsed in the opening act of this film. The rest of the movie is split into booklike chapters, running us up and down the Fury Road in, hanging off or crashing into a giant chrome-plated war machine. While arguably not quite as gobsmacking as it was almost a decade ago, it’s nevertheless filled with so many cataclysmically impressive set-pieces that it scarcely matters if any of it makes complete sense.

Taylor-Joy slips into this world with seemingly effortless grace, allowing audiences to combine her performance with Theron’s in our head-canon. Hemsworth is clearly having a ball playing a decidedly non-heroic type, almost as if the prosthetic nose he sports was all the excuse he needed to let his freak flag fly.

In many ways, FURIOSA feels like an extended appendix to Fury Road, especially given that Miller ends this by leading us by the hand into the story’s ‘sequel.’ So, did we need this story? From a narrative perspective, perhaps not. Yet as fans of high-octane movies, we greedily accept this meaty specimen of action fun, especially in a cinematic landscape that occasionally feels as barren as a post-apocalyptic Australia.

2024 | Australia, USA | DIRECTOR: George Miller | WRITERS: George Miller, Nico Lathouris | CAST: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Lachy Hulme | DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Pictures (Australia) | RUNNING TIME: 148 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 23 May 2024 (Australia), 24 May 2024 (USA)

May 16, 2024
Review: Mank

Whether Citizen Kane is still the greatest film ever made is a matter of regular debate, one I’ve engaged in from time to time. Yet almost eight decades after its release, it is unquestionably one of the most influential movies in the canon.

Even more fascinating is the story behind the printed legend. The debut work of talented wunderkind Orson Welles and his war with newspaper magnate William Randolf Hearst has been covered in the documentary The Battle for Citizen Kane, and later fictionalised in RKO 281 (1999). Both acknowledge the importance of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, best known at the time as the fixer of other people’s screenplays.

Now co-credited as the writer of Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz’s life and process serves as the focal point of David Fincher’s MANK, his first feature in six years. Based on the screenplay of his father Jack Fincher (who died in 2003), the film casts Gary Oldman as the titular Mank.

The writer is introduced as a literally broken man: an alcoholic exiled by Welles (Tom Burke) to a remote house, and his leg in plaster from a hitherto undisclosed accident. Tended to by secretary Rita (Lily Collins) and a German nurse, the writing process unfolds through flashbacks to his tumultuous relationship with Hearst (a magnificent Charles Dance), Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) and MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard).

While the Finchers lean a little heavily into Pauline Kael’s (largely debunked) 1971 essay claiming Mank’s sole authorship of Citizen Kane, not to mention Mank’s own contention of sole writing credit, this is a mighty fine piece of filmmaking from Mr. Fincher the younger. Maybe even one of his best.

On a technical level, Fincher and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (Mindhunter, Gone Girl) pay tribute to much of Welles’ style – from the non-linear narrative to the prodigious emphasis on light and shadow. The period accurate Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score is a revelation from the duo who, let’s face it, have produced some excellent but samey pieces over the years.

It’s a strong portrait of a flawed human, played with characteristic aplomb by Oldman, while Welles and co take a serious backseat to the the Mank/Hearst dichotomy. In a stark contrast with RKO 281, it’s nice to see Seyfried’s Marion Davies given more agency than the Melanie Griffith version. Indeed, Fincher goes in the opposite direction by casting Davies as a self-aware wit and equal to Mank’s own mind.

Yet she is one of the few women who gets a strong outing though, as most other women in the cast – from Tuppence Middleton as Mank’s wife (‘poor Sarah’) to Collins as a captive audience – are merely background players.

Instead, there’s an entire sidebar about the political war in Hollywood around the gubernatorial race of socialist Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye). Already slightly discombobulating in its shifting perspectives, the race is a symbolic but arguably extraneous detail, one that only feels like its there to draw parallels with Kane‘s narrative beats.

Nevertheless, MANK is a constantly compelling portrait. Critic and historian Robert Carringer may have put the authorship debate to bed over 40 years ago, but thanks to Fincher we have a lovingly detailed and vividly realised time capsule of this endlessly intriguing period.

2020 | US | DIRECTOR: David Fincher | WRITER: Jack Fincher| CAST: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Charles Dance, Tom Pelphrey, Sam Troughton, Ferdinand Kingsley, Tuppence Middleton, Tom Burke, Joseph Cross, Jamie McShane, Toby Leonard Moore, Monika Gossmann | DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix| RUNNING TIME: 131 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 19 November 2020 (Limited theatrical), 4 December 2020 (Netflix)

November 23, 2020