Steven Soderbergh: Making Great Movies in 100 Minutes or Less Since 1989
DIRECTOR: STEVEN SODERBERGH/2025
I’ve started 2025 thinking through a potential thesis: All films should run less than two hours or longer than three. For every exception to that theorem coming to your mind—North by Northwest! West Side Story! The Shawshank Redemption!—can’t you think of at least two more titles running two hours and change that felt too long or poorly paced?
My other case in point: The man, the myth, the legend Steven Soderbergh. Less than two months after the wide release the 84-minute found footage ghost story Presence, he is directing the 93-minute espionage thriller Black Bag. His last narrative feature over two hours was 2008’s four-hour, two-part epic Che; you can count the rest of his features that exceed two hours on one hand. (If their credits had been speedier, Out of Sight, Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s Thirteen might have squeezed in under the two-hour mark as well.) If a Best Director Oscar winner can make 16 of his 35 films in 100 minutes or less, it begs the question: Why does the standard blockbuster need more time than that? Of 2024’s top 40 at the box office, nearly half ran between two and three hours, almost all of which categorized as action or thriller. So why don’t more of them feel as fun as Soderbergh’s newest action-tinged thriller?
Taking inspiration from ‘70s paranoia thrillers like The Conversation, Klute, The Parallax View, and especially Three Days of the Condor (all of which, hey, are under two hours), Soderbergh’s latest stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as George and Kathryn, married co-workers at the National Cyber Security Center in London. What she doesn’t know: He’s just been tipped off about a mole inside the agency, and she’s on the list of people with means and motive to release a new dangerous tech into the wild. Also on the list of suspects: Two other intra-agency couples (Marisa Abela and Tom Burke; Naomie Harris and Regé Jean-Page). Because this is a spy movie with mid-century inspirations, George kicks off his research at an intimate dinner party with twisty mind games he hopes will reveal true intentions and alliances. But because this is also a marriage movie, this mole hunt also tests his and Kathryn’s honesty and loyalty within their union—the clock is ticking in both investigations.
Like in Soderbergh’s other films centered on some kind of mystery (see the Ocean’s series, Logan Lucky, No Sudden Move, and even Erin Brockovich), the revelation of the mole’s identity matters less than the journey to get there. When I wrote about Out of Sight for our Steven Soderbergh Film Admissions feature a few years ago, I described his canon as “smooth, suave, and sexy;” though I’ve since learned there are some exceptions (see Traffic, for one), almost all of his features live up to at least a two of those three alliterative descriptors with sharp editing, soigné casts and sets, and storytelling sans distractions. Black Bag feels at times like a spiritual sequel to Out of Sight because of its conflicted romance at the center and because it lives up to the “smooth, suave, and sexy” mantra more than most of his recent output. Smooth: A (mostly) coherent plot with twists that don’t break the interior logic in 93 minutes. Suave: All of the interiors, especially in George and Kathryn’s home, are so chic I want to burn my own house down. Sexy: While there’s no time for sex scenes, it very much matters who’s sleeping with whom.
Smooth, suave, and sexy, of course, also describe our cast, who continue to prove they are capable of great work even in the kind of unshowy parts that are rarely up for Oscars. While Blanchett and Fassbender’s performances feel akin to their recent work in Tár and The Killer, they add new sensitivity even as they stay in conversation with those past characters with icy exteriors. Similarly, are Harris and Pierce Brosnan commenting on their past roles in the world of 007? If it’s not intentional, they seem self aware. Abela and Burke’s fracas-prone couple, though, are the standout supporting players, her unpredictability and his resignation a dysfunctional complement. David Koepp’s script (his third Soderbergh collab) doesn’t invite the deepest of thought about people’s commitment to their work—not an complaint, just an observation—but performances like these add welcome layers.
Time will tell if Black Bag will rank among Soderbergh’s most-loved works, though that’s a high bar. Again, that’s not a complaint, just an observation—I’ll never complain about solid work in a prolific career, and busy people always interest me more than those who keep us waiting for their return. Soderbergh has made it clear in interviews and his choices in everything from cameras to marketing that he wants to keep trying new tricks, and he’s no stranger to promoting multiple projects at a time. Most famously, in 2001 he was Oscar-nominated for directing both Erin Brockovich and Traffic, and 2025 is the tenth time he’s dropped at least two film or television titles within the year. Using your power to do what you want isn’t the same as overindulgence, and we could use more creative people who just try stuff. (An example from another prolific artist busy since 1989: Doing what you want is regularly dropping multiple albums a year; indulgence is writing songs about the same backstabbing phone call for eight years.) So if Soderbergh wants to try shooting blown-out lighting and making Goodfellas allusions with extreme close-ups of slicing garlic and long, handheld shots entering nightclubs, we’re only better off for it. He can pull it off inside a more-than-competent espionage thriller/marital drama in less than 100 minutes—who can complain about that?
