Michael Fassbender, the spy who always knows if you're lying or not

Oh, what's this new spy thriller about Michael Fassbender appearing in London? Yeah, man, his love life becomes a weapon for his enemies on an international intelligence-trafficking mission? More clues, of course: his boss is a veteran actor, with gray hair, but still handsome. With this information, there could be two titles: either the series or the The agency (and the silver fox would be Richard Gere), or the new film by Steven Soderbergh, Confidential (black bag), which has practically the same elements (and Pierce Brosnan plays the director of the British spy agency). In fact, both works could be compared face to face, pointing to each other like the famous Spiderman meme.

However, in Soderbergh's film, Michael Fassbender is not a tormented super agent but a robotic and expressionless professional specialized in lie detection. But it is true that current audiovisual fictions tend toward mimicry, as if outside of genres and aesthetics of proven effectiveness neither creators nor audiences dare to go beyond. In this case, however, the always interesting—but also impersonal—Soderbergh puts into images a story by David Koepp—once a golden Hollywood screenwriter—that plays with our expectations in an effective and sophisticated entertainment that, thanks to its duration of only an hour and a half, is surely more rounded and compact than not.