Review: 'The Friend' is a gentle comedy-drama about grief and writing, bolstered by Naomi Watts and a friendly four-legged co-star

In the quietly effective comedy-drama “The Friend,” Naomi Watts is blessed with one of the best scene partners an actor has ever had — a stoic Great Dane named Bing.

Watts plays Iris Dickson, a New York author who’s grieving over the recent death of her writing mentor and longtime friend, Walter Meredith (Bill Murray). At the memorial service, it’s clear that Iris isn’t the only one processing Walter’s death by suicide. The mourners include two ex-wives, Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) and Elaine (Carla Gugino), current wife Tuesday (Constance Wu), his publisher Jerry (Josh Pais), and his daughter, Val (Sara Pidgeon). Notably, Val’s mother isn’t any of the three wives, but a woman who had a brief fling with Walter shortly after he divorced Elaine.

While Iris is looking through the files for her unfinished novel, which Walter didn’t like, and working with Val to edit a book of Walter’s years of correspondence, Barbara asks Iris over to help with something. That something is to take custody of Walter’s dog, Apollo — played by Bing. Iris is ill-equipped to take on a dog that outweighs her, but she’s also unable to say no.

So Iris must deal with a large animal in a small apartment — a place that strictly does not allow dogs, which her building super, Hektor (Felix Solis), reminds her regularly. Iris looks for an animal sanctuary that takes Great Danes, and in the meantime tries to deal with Apollo’s eating habits, sleeping arrangements and distrust of her building’s tiny elevator.

As the story — adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel by the writing-directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (“The Deep End,” “What Maisie Knew”) — gently unfolds, we come to know that Apollo is a good listener, particularly of anyone reading Walter’ words aloud. He also becomes a vessel through which Iris finally gets to process her complicated feelings for Walter and the way he chose to exit her life.

Watts gives a strong performance as Iris, a woman forced by weird circumstance to get out of her own head to deal with the memory of her mentor and the needs of this stoic mass of a dog. Murray, seen in flashbacks, adds a hint of his impish personality to Walter, and makes it easier to understand why so many women could love him and be aggravated by him.

But the character you’ll come away loving in “The Friend” is Apollo, and credit to Bing and his trainer/parent, Bev Klingensmith, for delivering a dog performance that isn’t instantly cloying and comical.

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‘The Friend’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 4, in theaters. Rated R for language including a sexual reference. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'A Minecraft Movie' builds on blocks of offbeat humor, and the hilarious bromantic pairing of Jack Black and Jason Momoa.

You can’t argue with someone to convince them something is funny — it’s either funny to you or it isn’t, and what you find funny isn’t what someone else will think is hilarious, and there’s no use applying reason or logic to make someone feel otherwise. Funny is very subjective.

That’s a lesson I learned in full more than 20 years ago, when director Jared Hess made “Napoleon Dynamite,” a movie that many (including me) think is gut-bustlingly funny and others think is just weird and off-putting. That same lesson comes roaring back into view with Hess’ new movie, his first big-budget special-effects film, “A Minecraft Movie.”

Yes, this is based on the mega-popular world-building video game franchise, where people use 8-bit and 16-bit bricks of various materials — dirt, wood, stone, what have you — and construct buildings, creatures and entire worlds. It’s a game where players can create anything they can imagine, which also means it’s a game that doesn’t have a story, because the game player is supposed to create that on their own.

Hess and the movie’s six credited writers — notably the team of Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer, friends of Hess from Brigham Young University — recognize the game’s story-free sandbox is a challenge. It’s also an opportunity, to pack as many cool things from the game as they can, and find a through line to connect them all that will please the game’s fans and newbies. It’s important that the title says “A Minecraft Movie,” not “The Minecraft Movie,” an acknowledgement that no one is presenting their interpretation of the game as the only one.

The movie’s prologue sets up the idea that there’s a portal between our world and the strange realm called the OverWorld, where the Minecraft universe exists. It’s a place where the animals and plants are all boxy, and even the full moon is a big square. It’s quickly explained that nightfall happens every 20 minutes — one of many gags that veteran players will laugh at with recognition. Our guide to this weird world is Steve, a man in his turquoise vest who learns to harness his imagination into building amazing things. 

The fact that Steve is played by Jack Black is a first indication that none of what we see is meant to be taken too seriously – and that we’re in for a lot of fun.

We cut away from Steve for a bit to meet the movie’s other characters. There’s Natalie (Emma Myers), a young woman trying to take care of herself and her high-schooler brother, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), after the untimely death of their mother. The two are moving to a new town – Chuglass, Idaho, the potato chip capital of the world — where Natalie has just landed a job creating social media for the local potato processing plant.

Henry, a nerdy inventor with notebooks full of sketches of contraptions, finds his way to an old video game store. Its owner, Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison — played by Jason Momoa — is a former video game champion, but those glory days are long in the past. There’s a strong hint of Uncle Rico, Napoleon Dynamite’s stuck-in-nostalgia relative, in Garrett’s story, which propels Momoa’s rather fearless comic performance.

Henry finds two objects in Garrett’s store: A glowing blue orb (that’s actually a cube) and a crystal box into which the orb fits snugly. Henry discovers that when they’re put together, the portal to the OverWorld appears. So, of course, Henry, Natalie, Garrett and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) — the kids’ real estate agent and new friend — go through it and find a strange land. 

They also find Steve, who explains to them the weird physics of this land — like how if you combine a chicken and hot lava, you get fire-roasted chicken. (There’s a great bit of animation, involving Minecraft pandas, which is both funny and a capsule explanation of how the OverWorld works.) Our team soon discovers that they can only get home if they recover the orb and the crystal, which means defeating an army of nasty porcine creatures called Piglins, led by their greedy queen, Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House).

And while this is “A Minecraft Movie,” which is packed to the gills with creative computer animation and effects from New Zealand’s Weta FX, it’s also fully and hilariously a Jared Hess movie. That means the humor is broad and silly, which feels perfectly in character with a world where blocks of rock and wood appear wherever someone points their finger. It’s also a movie where, like with “Napoleon Dynamite,” there’s an unusual amount of attention given to tater tots — which apparently are to Hess’ movies what bare feet are to Quentin Tarantino films.

Carrying the comedy load are Black — reuniting with Hess 19 years after their wrestling comedy “Nacho Libre” — and Momoa, who create a bromance of bravado as they take on the Piglin army. It’s hard to compete with those two, whose personalities are as comically oversized as their beards, but Myers makes a strong impression as the serious older sister. (Jennifer Coolidge, our patron saint of uncomfortable comedy, gets extended laughs as Henry’s principal, who has an encounter with an OverWorld villager.)

Like I said, you may not find Hess’ brand of off-the-wall humor to your liking, and for that you have my pity. If you think “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre” are funny, then “A Minecraft Movie” will provide you with plenty of laughs.

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‘A Minecraft Movie’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violence/action, language, suggestive/rude humor and some scary images. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'Death of a Unicorn' aims to blend gory comedy with social satire, but the mix only works sporadically

The satire in the chaotically funny “Death of a Unicorn” may be obvious at times, but the targets — a family of selfish billionaires who made their ill-gotten wealth in pharmaceuticals — are too irresistible.

The death referred to in the title comes very early, as Elliot (Paul Rudd), a corporate lawyer, and his sullen teen daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), are driving through a game preserve. Then Elliot hits something in the road. When they get out of the car, they see it’s a unicorn, bleeding purple on its pure-white fur. Ridley touches the creature’s horn, and has a cosmic vision — until Elliot whacks the animal with a tire iron, thinking he’s putting it out of its misery.

They load the creature into the back of their vehicle, and continue up to the secluded woodside mansion of Elliot’s boss, Big Pharma CEO Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), who’s dying. While Elliot is trying to get Odell to sign some papers, he notices that he doesn’t need his glasses any more — while Ridley’s face, on which unicorn blood splashed, is suddenly free of acne. Then the dead unicorn turns out to be alive, and Odell realizes the animal could provide a miracle cure.

The reactions of the rest of the Leopold family are curious. Odell’s wife, Belinda (Téa Leoni), the family philanthropist, talks about how to ration out the unicorn’s curative powers to the truly deserving — which means rich people like herself. Their son, Shepard (Will Poulter), an idiot who fancies himself a deep thinker, thinks he’s found an elixir for immortality — by pulverizing the horn and snorting lines of the powder.

While Odell’s in-house doctors (Steve Park and Sunita Mani) run tests, Ridley researches the mythology of unicorns — and finds they’re not the sweetly innocent creatures of lore, but blood-thirsty killing machines. And more seem to be coming up to the house.

Writer-director Alex Scharfman, in an audacious feature debut, locates some barbed humor in the hypocrisies of the wealthy Leopold family, talking a good game about the greater good until their greed and ambition show them as they really are. The material gives Grant, Leoni and especially Poulter room to reveal their money-grubbing selves.

Where this plan starts to come undone is when it tries to get Rudd, the most amiable movie actor ever created, to join the Leopolds in their venality. It never feels authentic, because it’s hard to think of a less plausible actor in the role, outside of casting a Smurf.

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‘Death of a Unicorn’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 28, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent content, gore, language and some drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'The Penguin Lessons' serves teacher cliches and a cute animal, tastelessly set on a backdrop of authoritarian horror

One of the most horrific things we’ve seen in recent days is the surveillance video of a Turkish woman, living in America on a student visa at Tufts University, being surrounded by masked thugs working for your federal government and hustling her into an unmarked car to take her Lord knows where.

This kind of jackbooted fascism is depicted in a moment of “The Penguin Lessons,” a movie set in Buenos Aires in 1976, where a military junta “disappeared” thousands of Argentinians for daring to speak out against authoritarian regime.

To call the scene in the movie “problematic” is mild to the point of absurdity, for a couple of reasons. One is that the focus is not on the young Argentinian woman being taken away, but on an observer — a middle-aged Englishman, played by Steve Coogan, as if to say he’s really the victim here.

The other is that the scene is made small by the odd juxtaposition in the middle of a whimsical comedy-drama about the Englishman and his unexpected companion, a penguin.

In this movie “inspired by true events” — and one imagines that word “inspired” is doing a lot of work here — Coogan plays Tom Michell, a misanthropic English teacher arriving at a new job at a boarding school in Buenos Aires, teaching the sons of Argentina’s ruling elite and military officers. 

Tom is sarcastic towards authority, embodied here by Jonathan Pryce’s turn as the headmaster. Tom is also a sad, unfocused figure, for reasons that are eventually explained but for the first half just make him look like a jerk.

When the school goes on an unexpected break, for safety reasons involving a military coup, Tom and Tapio (Buörn Gustafsson), a Swedish teaching colleague, take an impromptu trip to nearby Uruguay. Tom ends up spending the night walking the beach with an attractive woman (Mica Breque), and as they walk they find a penguin washed up in an oil slick. They sneak the penguin back to Tom’s hotel and clean it up — and Tom ends up the penguin’s reluctant caretaker.

Director Peter Cattaneo (“The Full Monty”) and screenwriter Jeff Pope (Coogan’s writing partner on “Philomena”) run through scenes with Coogan dutifully reciting Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Masefield to inspire his young charges, who inspire him to care again about his profession, and so on. Just think of any movie you’ve ever seen about a teacher, from “Dead Poets Society” to “Dangerous Minds” — and add a penguin.

Which brings me back to that kidnapping scene. Because the “whimsy” knob is already set to 11, any attempt at seriously depicting the Argentine junta’s brutality feels crass and exploitative. Thousands of people, we’re told, were never accounted for after they were “disappeared” — and this movie presents the idea that it wasn’t so bad because it helped a shaggy-haired Brit find his smile again.

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‘The Penguin Lessons’

★★

Opens Friday, March 28, at theaters. Rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual references and thematic elements. Running time: 112 minutes; in English and Spanish with subtitles. 

Review: 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' is a moving drama from Zambia that shows generational trauma is universal

Like any movie from another country, writer-director Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” stops to ask us what we have in common with people in, in this case, Zambia — like how patriarchy and generational sexism are universal.

Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving home one night from a party — where, one assumes, her Missy Elliott costume was a hit — when she sees a body lying in the road. When she stops, she sees that the body is that of her Uncle Fred. For a moment, she catches a glimpse of herself as a little girl, and the audience immediately senses there’s some history here.

Shula tries to call her mother for help. While she’s waiting, her cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), walks up, apparently feeling the effects of too much alcohol wherever she was this evening. 

By morning, everyone in town knows that Fred has died, and people start piecing together why he was in that particular part of town so late at night. For Shula and some of her female cousins, there’s a pattern here — involving Fred’s predilection for young women, including ones within his family. 

But as Shula’s house and backyard start filling with relatives for Fred’s funeral, there’s little time to think about Fred’s past sins. Shula and the other young women are put to work, cooking food for all of the mourners, and for keeping the peace among the female cousins of her mother’s generation, who seem to be in an undeclared contest to appear to be the most grief-stricken. Meanwhile, the men of the family sit around and expect Shula and her cousins to keep serving them plates of food, like they’re waitresses in an outdoor cafe.

Nyoni never declares it outright, but it’s clear Shula is the oldest of the female cousins of her generation. She’s the one expected to be in charge, of carrying the weight of keeping the funeral attendees fed as well as the emotional weight of holding the family secrets. Chardy’s compelling performance shows Shula holding the family and herself together, though it’s clear that if she should snap, the explosion would be heard for miles.

Nyoni steeps “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” in bits of Zambian culture that become an anthropological lesson for outsiders. Just below the surface, though, is a deeper, universal truth about generational trauma and the courage it takes to challenge it.

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‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 21, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some drug use and suggestive references. Running time: 99 minutes; in English and Bemba, with subtitles.

Review: 'Universal Language' presents a surreal, absurdist story steeped in Canadian kindness

The title of Canadian director Matthew Rankin’s oddly touching “Universal Language” becomes apparent gradually, as the viewer realizes where and what is going on — and that the weirdness and whimsy are only starting.

We start at a school where the sign out front is in Farsi, the language of Iran. Then the subtitle tells us the school’s name: Robert H. Smith School. Then we see a teacher rush through the snow and in the front doors, then go to his classroom and berate his students — in French.

We soon figure out that we’re in an alternate-universe version of Winnipeg, Rankin’s home town, where the bilingual mix isn’t English and French, but French and Farsi. While the viewer untangles that, they must also keep track of the wide array of characters who bounce off each other through the interwoven narrative.

There’s the angry teacher, Iraj (Mani Soleymanlou), who berates his students, particularly young Omid (Sobhan Javadi), who lost his glasses and can’t see the blackboard. Two of his classmates, Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) and Negin (Rojina Esmaeili), want to get him new glasses, and they think they can when they find a 500 Riel note (named for Louis Riel, the founder of Manitoba) frozen in the ice. While they look for a way to break the ice, they ask Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), who has many jobs around Winnipeg, to watch the space and not steal the money or the ice.

Each of these characters, at one point or another, encounters Matthew (played by Rankin), a morose fellow who has left his job in Montreal to return home to Winnipeg to care for his ailing grandmother. When he goes to his old house, he learns she’s no longer there — but the family that lives there now welcomes him anyway. He calls his mom’s phone number, and the man who answers agrees to meet him at a Tim Hortons, a coffee-and-donuts chain that is as much a symbol of Canada as the maple leaf, even when the cafe’s sign is in Farsi.

As Matthew makes his way through a Winnipeg that feels both familiar and foreign, in ways that have nothing to do with people speaking Farsi, the movie’s thesis comes into focus: That kindness is everywhere, if one only looks around or opens themselves up to experience it. 

Some of this kindness can be ascribed as “Canadian nice,” that legendary national trait of politeness and easygoing charm that doesn’t get rattled by much — other than losing at hockey or hearing some blowhard talk about creating a 51st state. (But, really, who does that?) 

Rankin, following up on his 2019 expressionist history tale “The Twentieth Century,” peppers this complex narrative with moments of surreal silliness, whether it’s a shop that only displays frozen turkeys or an ice skater who appears literally out of nowhere. He demonstrates in “Universal Language,” that we do indeed have more that unites us than separates us — no matter what language we’re speaking.

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‘Universal Language’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for thematic material. Running time: 89 minutes; in Farsi and French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Snow White' gets an enjoyable 21st century update, thanks to the charms of stars Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot

Who’s the fairest of them all? That’s a high bar for any movie, particularly a remake of a 1937 classic that revolutionized animation and is considered a work of art — but Disney’s 2025 take on “Snow White” is, in its best moments, a pleasant update.

It’s a familiar story, not just from Walt Disney’s beloved “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” but centuries of the Brothers Grimm: A princess is born, given the name Snow White, and raised by a kindly king and queen in a kingdom where the royals party with the farmers and bakers and all is well. Then the queen takes ill and dies, and the king is enchanted by a beautiful stranger (played here by Gal Gadot), who gets the king out of the way and sets herself up as a greedy, evil queen.

As the story goes, the Queen also is vain, constantly asking her magic mirror (voiced by Patrick Page) “who’s the fairest of them all?” For many years, the mirror answers that the Queen is the fairest. But as Snow White reaches adulthood, in the form of “West Side Story” star Rachel Zegler, the mirror declares that she, not the Queen, is more fair.

The Queen orders her huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to take Snow into the woods, kill her, and cut out her heart. But the huntsman can’t bring himself to do the deed, and tells Snow to run deep into the forest and hide. After some encounters with grabby tree branches, she lands among some kind forest animals, who lead her to a place to sleep: A cottage inhabited by seven small men. (It’s an interesting exercise the movie sets up to create computer-animated characters who look like the classic cartoon characters, but never use the d-word from the original’s title.)

Highlighting the seven characters is just one example of the constant tug-of-war director Mark Webb (who made the Andrew Garfield “Amazing Spider-Man” movies) and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (whose last script was the adaptation of “The Girl on the Train”) are engaged in with Walt Disney’s source material and his company’s marketing department. As much as they stay close to the original’s visual and musical touchstones, the filmmakers also recognize that this is a different era, and we expect something else from our title heroines.

Ziegler’s Snow White isn’t just wishing for her prince to come, but for her kingdom to return to what it was before the Queen began her evil reign. She’s also wishing — as she explains in her solo “Waiting on a Wish” — for the courage, taught to her by her parents, to act for the good of the people. She gets her first taste of that bravery when she helps a daring bandit, Jonathan, escape the Queen’s clutches. 

Jonathan is charming, but he’s no prince. Played by Andrew Burnap (who played Joseph Smth in the miniseries “Under the Banner of Heaven”), Jonathan is reminiscent of the likable rogue Flynn from Disney’s “Tangled.” And, like Flynn and Rapunzel, Jonathan and Snow start out bantering and bickering before the rom-com realizations set in.

Other changes to the plot feel necessary to maintain a PG rating, and are an admission by Disney that some of the darkest moments of the 1937 movie are — and always were — too scary for kids. And some things from the original are just dated; anyone who’s the title character in her own movie in 2025 isn’t sitting around waiting for her prince, but instead taking the fight to the Queen.

Then there are the songs, only three of which have been carried over from the original. Two of them, “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work,” are expanded into engaging musical numbers. The third, “The Silly Song,” starts a celebration party that segues to “A Hand Meets a Hand,” a love duet for Zegler and Burnap. The new songs are from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songwriting team behind “La La Land’ and “The Greatest Showman,” and go from forgettable to satisfactory.

One of the better numbers is the Queen’s “All Is Fair,” which feels like something Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” might perform as an encore to “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” Gadot has fun with the song, which is her one opportunity to deliver more than one-note icy villainy.

Zegler is the best thing about this “Snow White.” She’s got the singing voice and the acting chops, proving that her Maria in “West Side Story” wasn’t a one-off. She carries the story, particularly in the reinterpretation of Snow as a princess finding her own way toward leadership rather than being a passive object of other character’s devotion or jealousy. She’s got charisma for miles — and I truly think that Zegler, if pressed, could charm actual woodland creatures, not just computer-animated ones.

There will be fans of Disney’s original who will be upset with the changes Webb and his collaborators have made here. Some of those people have been down on this movie from the moment Zegler, a Latina, was cast as Snow — and were even more dismissive when Zegler posted an emotional response to Donald Trump’s re-election. Just wait until they unpack the story’s politics, of a populist uprising trying to bring down a selfish, self-loving autocrat.

For some fans, I think, the problem is less to do with what the filmmakers have done, and more with the idea that the studio allowed them to change anything at all. That’s an argument that traps the story of Snow White in a glass coffin of nostalgia — lovely to look at, but inert and lifeless. Every generation should have the chance to discover “Snow White” and make it their own, and it shouldn’t take 88 years for the next one. 

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‘Snow White’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violence, some peril, thematic elements and brief rude humor. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'Black Bag' is a stylish, sly and steamy spy movie where the stars and the set design are equally alluring

You’re supposed to judge a movie not by the scenery but by what the actors are doing in front of that scenery — but in the case of Steven Soderbergh’s sleek spy thriller “Black Bag,” both are sexy as hell.

It’s London, and our main venue is the supremely appointed townhouse where married spies George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean Woodhouse (Cate Blanchett) live, cook extravagant meals and deliver urbane, super-hot endearments to each other. Example: Kathryn catches George watching her get dressed, and when he says he’s sorry, she replies, “I like it.”

George has been given a top-secret — or “black bag” — assignment by another operative, Philip Meacham (played by Gustaf Skarsgård, yet another of those Skarsgårds). A super-sensitive and potentially deadly bit of software called Cerberus has gone missing, and Meacham has a list of five people within British intelligence who might have taken it. One of those on the list is Kathryn.

George, whose expertise is in polygraph tests and detecting lies, and Kathryn host a dinner party. Unknown to Kathryn, the guests are the other four people on Meacham’s list. They include two agents, Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), staff psychologist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), and data analyst Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela). Not so coincidentally, James and Zoe are dating, and so are Freddie and Clarissa. 

During a party game, Clarissa reveals that she knows Freddie is cheating on her. When Freddie denies it, George drops the details of which hotel and at what times Freddie is having his affair.

At the end of the party, George makes an odd discovery: A used movie ticket in Kathryn’s wastebasket. Could this be evidence of Kathryn being unfaithful to him?

Those are just some of the clues — or are they diversions? — that Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp (the director’s collaborator on the recent “Presence” and “Kimi”) plant on this movie’s winding path, which is smart both in its twists and in its gorgeous production design. (Credit here goes to Philip Messina, who also worked magic for Soderbergh on “Erin Brockovich,” “Traffic,” and his three “Ocean’s” movies.)

Soderbergh’s ensemble is also smart, stylish and as hot as six human beings have a right to be. Fassbender and Blanchett lead the way, of course, with their slightly sinister take on Nick and Nora Charles — and give special attention to Abela (who played Amy Winehouse in the biopic “Back in Black”), who makes tapping on a keyboard look like foreplay.

Soderbergh brings a coiled tension to the action and verbal gymnastics of “Black Bag” — particularly in a tight sequence where George gives polygraph tests to four of his suspects, which is a masterclass in editing and camerawork. (Soderbergh, under pseudonyms, takes on the jobs of cinematographer and editor, along with directing.) The best part is that Soderbergh does this all so seamlessly that a viewer can admire the technique while not losing the thread of the narrative. How does Soderbergh do it? I’m afraid that’s a secret.

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‘Black Bag’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language including some sexual references, and some violence. Running time: 95 minutes.