“My dead friend Zoe” is painfully authentic, while “Black Bag” is a convincing puzzle

By Kirk Boxleitner

The fault of the survivors of veterans and the duplicity of the international espionage cause a great tour in Kyle Hausmann-Stokes “My Dead Friend Zoe” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag”.

“My Dead Friend Zoe” takes a shameful and occasional sour look at how a veteran of the US Army Afghanistan (or more precisely) with the loss of her best friend in uniform (or more precisely), while she was commissioned to act with the decline of her Stoian grandfather, whose military service she had inspired to invigorate herself to first place.

Between “The Walking Dead” and “Star Trek: Discovery” Sonequa Martin-Green comes into the role of earnings, our experienced protagonist, with a catted play face.

And Ed Harris, like her grandfather Dale, not only plays a similarly strictly paternal role in last year’s “love lane bleeding”, but also played fighting offices so often that he makes it easier than breathing.

But the real revelation here is Merit’s dead friend Zoe, played by Natalie Morales, in which I fell in love for the first time in “The Middleman” from 2008.

Zoe appears not only in flashbacks before her death, but also as a phantom presence that only deserves or hears.

Instead of pulling a cheap serioctic renovation of the “sixth sense”, Hausmann-Stokes makes it clear that Dead Zoe is only the PTBS-induced hallucination of Merit.

Morales also makes an impressively skillful task of conveying the distinction between the real, reminding Zoe, which admittedly showed some toxic features, and Merits presented Zoe, whose flashes reflect on the malicious cruelty that they are simply a manifestation of Merit’s self -confident self -loss.

A difficult but necessary part of the grief of a fallen friend recognize the self-saboting deficits that you may have made a pain that could sometimes be used to use it, instead of relying on a socket, and the mercurial dynamics between earnings and zoe (both in life and in death) honors this unpleasant truth.

The Hausmann-Stokes-based Merit and Zoe stories about those of their comrades and his comrades and his support group scenes with actual veterans, including the sensitive but not excesses leader from Dr. Cole of the circle, played by Real Life Us Air Force Veteran Morgan Freeman.

It is even more important that Hausmann-Stokes’ final twist is aware of how the life of the veterans can also be lost through the battlefield through trauma. Therefore, he deserves the right to boxes of the film of this film, especially because it is a good reason.

Black bag
Marriage values

“Black Bag” initially feels like Michael Fassbender after “The Agency” on Paramount+on Autopilot, since he plays another bale-cabin intelligent daiser who rolls the hard six by mixing his questionably stable personal relationships with the fate of global security.

The added value here is director Soderbergh, fresh from the triumph of his vision, which at the beginning of this year Haunted House film “Presence” as well as Cate Blanchett and a blessing trust brings both Galadriel from “The Lord of the Rings” and Hela of “Thor: Ragnarok”.

Blanchetts deceptively calm smile, like the Mona Lisa, who gently breaks, reflects, reflects and balances the throbbing temple of Fassbender’s forehead. They define the narrow edges of his attempted mask of non-expression of the face, the heart of which is the thickness of the thick, square frames of his glasses in Michael Caine style.

Blanchett’s ability to emot the subtle enough to keep some secrets, even from the audience, is for the carefully constructed conspiracy of “Black Bag”, whose puzzles develop in order to reveal a masterpiece in miniatures.

Without Blanchett’s gift for ambiguities, “Black Bag” would have been reduced to a less pyrotechnic execution of a premise of the nose like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”.

David Koepp is a productive but deeply uneven screenwriter. So we are lucky that the Koepp, which showed “Black Bag”, was not the one who wrote the two recent films by Indiana Jones.

Pierce Brosnan hardly appears long enough to provide an effortless lesson, how to deal with Le Carré-Homaging with such a material, while Naomie Harris continues her paradoxical run from alive to her characters, such as a chameleon that hides behind his changing spectrum of colors.

David Holmes’ cool musical score complements the steamed tones of the political thriller atmosphere and the aesthetics of the 1970s.

While “Black Bag” ultimately makes a relatively light puzzle overall, its resolution still feels as refreshing and satisfying as a mint after dinner.