The movie arrives only two months after Soderbergh's last movie Presence, a unique spin on a haunted house movie. He's not that fast of a filmmaker, it's just a quirk of release scheduling, but if Black Bag is the result, then even two months is too long to wait.

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.

Tom Burke, so good in The Souvenir if not so much Furiosa, works his mercurial wit as the pompous Freddie Smalls, a slitheringly machismo character you wouldn’t trust with your lunch, let alone the nation’s most hush-hush ‘black bag’ secrets.