Marisa Abela Archives – CULTURE MIX

Review: ‘Black Bag’ (2025), starring Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page and Pierce Brosnan

March 6, 2025

by Carla Hay

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in “Black Bag” (Photo by Claudette Barius/Focus Features)

“Black Bag” (2025)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Culture Representation: Taking place in London, the dramatic film “Black Bag” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some black people and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Six agents who work for the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) find themselves involved in an undercover investigation to expose a mole/traitor in the group.

Culture Audience: “Black Bag” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh and well-made spy movies.

Pictured clockwise, from left to right: Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela in “Black Bag” (Photo by Claudette Barius/Focus Features)

“Black Bag” is a sleek and stylish spy caper that invites viewers to indulge in the fantasy that so many spies look like movie stars. Their whip-smart and sarcastic conversations are just as entertaining as some of the action scenes. “Black Bag” might get some comparisons to the 2005 action film “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (about two married spies who go to war with each other), but “Black Bag” has a darker tone and is more of an intriguing mystery rather than a comedy.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp, “Black Bag” has two married spies at the center of the story, but they don’t really get into the type of knock-down, drag-out fights with each other like the couple at the center of the “Mrs. & Mrs. Smith” movie. The spouses in “Black Bag” have a relationship that is steeped in devotion as well as distrust, thereby keeping their romance steady but also on edge. The movie’s title is based on a black bag where the two spouses keep their biggest spy secrets.

The marriage becomes fraught with more tension when the husband gets an assignment to find out which person on a list of five suspects is a mole/traitor. His wife is on the list. The husband and the five suspects all work for National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), a United Kingdom espionage agency whose specialty is technology. The mole is involved in a conspiracy regarding Severus, a type of malware that can destabilize a nuclear facility.

These are six people who are directly involved in the investigation to expose the mole:

George Woodhouse (played by Michael Fassbender) has a stoic personality that masks a lot of past trauma. (His father committed suicide.) Although George often appears to be cold in the way that he treats people, he is actually a loving and monogamous husband. George has been given the assignment to secretly investigate the other five people.
Kathryn St. Jean (played by Cate Blanchett) is George’s wife, who lives and looks like a Hollywood glamour queen. Unlike George, who keeps a lot of his feelings bottled inside, Kathryn doesn’t hesitate to express her opinions. Kathryn and George have been longtime spies. They do not have any children together.
Col. James Stokes (played by Regé-Jean Page) is considered to be a star on the rise at NCSC. He has recently gotten a promotion. And the person who thinks he deserved the promotion the most is James, who is intelligent but very arrogant. James is also very stubborn and unlikely to want to consider other people’s points of as being more valid than his.
Dr. Zoe Vaughn (played by Naomie Harris), a staff psychiatrist for NCSC, is in a volatile romance with James. Kathryn is one of her patients. Zoe is the one in this group of six is most likely offer help or advice to someone who is going through personal diffculties. But in a story where people don’t trust each other, does Zoe have ulterior motives when she offers counseling and finds out people’s secrets?
Freddie Smalls (played by Tom Burke) is a deeply insecure substance abuser, who appears to be addicted to alcohol, pills and sex. Freddie is jealous of James (who is younger and has less experience) because James got the promotion that Freddie wanted. Freddie knows his self-destructive ways have made him a risk for NCSC. However, Freddie thinks his blunt (in other words: rude) communication style is an asset.
Clarissa Dubose (played by Marisa Abela) is the youngest person in this group of six. She has recently begun dating Freddie, who’s about 20 years older than Clarissa. She’s found out the hard way what Freddie can’t stay faithful to one person, so she has a love/hate relationship with him. Clarissa is in awe of Kathryn, whom Clarissa considered to be a role model in espionage.

Everything in “Black Bag” is intended to make the ugly business of espionage look as alluring and glamorous as possible. When George gets the assignment to find the mole, it’s not in some drab office. He goes to an exclusive nightclub where trendy-looking young people are dancing and partying. Inside the nightclub, he meets up with Philip Meacham (played by Gustaf Skarsgård), a troubled agent supervisor who gives him the assignment and a list of suspects. “Good luck finding the rat,” Philip tells George.

George is in a profession where lying is a requirement of the job, so it’s ironic that George repeatedly tells anyone who listens that he hates dishonesty. Monogamous spies are rare, according to what this movie repeats in conversations and actions. Philip commends George for being a faithful husband, which Philip confesses is something he could never be. Pierce Brosnan has a supporting role as dapper Arthur Stieglitz, the leader of the NCSC.

George and Kathryn aren’t the types of spies who blend in so they won’t be noticed. They’re the type of spies who want to stand out, as they glide around in designer clothing and invite guests into their posh home. Speaking of George and Kathryn hosting visitors in their home, some of the best scenes in the movie are the dinner party scenes, where tensions run high, and insults are thrown like daggers across a room.

In their home, George isn’t subservient to Kathryn, but he’s not completely dominant either. George likes to think of himself as the smartest person in any room he’s in, but he isn’t stuck in a macho mindset of thinking that men and women should have “traditional” roles in a marriage. For example, when George and Kathryn invite James, Zoe, Freddie and Clarissa to a dinner party, George is the one who does all the cooking. Kathryn is more likely than George to initiating sexual intimacy and demand what she wants.

George and Kathryn consider themselves to be the “alpha couple” of these three couples because George and Kathryn have the most experience and apparently the most connections in the spy world. However, Kathryn tells Zoe in a therapy that Kathryn has been having ongoing nightmares that aren’t going away anytime soon. Kathryn is required to be in therapy, and she despises it.

Unmarried couple James and Zoe seem to be in a constant battle with each other to prove who’s smarter than the other in their relationship. Neither of them is faithful to each other. In a therapy session, Kathryn makes a personal dig at Zoe when Kathryn comments that Zoe’s current infidelity lover is riff raff who is beneath Zoe’s social status.

Freddie and Clarissa are simply a disaster together. And it’s not because of their age gap, although Freddie cruelly tells Clarissa during an argument that she’s got daddy issues because Clarissa’s father abandoned her as a child. Freddie and Clarissa are no good for each other because they seem to be hooked on their toxic and abusive relationship, which includes physical violence.

All of the principal cast members handle their roles well. However, there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about their performances because they’ve all played these types of personalities in other movies. What makes “Black Bag” stand out the most from other spy movies is Koepp’s snappy screenplay with this unique concept of three spy couples under scrutiny.

Amid all of the drama between these couples, “Black Bag” has a wickedly sly touch in showing that these “know-it-alls” actually don’t know a lot of things about each other. Sure, there are car chases, shootouts and bomb explosions to raise the “life or death” stakes in the story. But the most dangerous threats to the movie’s characters are the mind games that they play with each other.

Focus Features will release “Black Bag” in U.S. cinemas on March 14, 2025, with a sneak preview on March 12, 2025.

Review: ‘Back to Black’ (2024), starring Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan and Lesley Manville

May 13, 2024

by Carla Hay

Marisa Abela in “Back to Black” (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)

“Back to Black” (2024)

Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson

Culture Representation: Taking place in the 2000s, mostly in England, the Amy Winehouse biopic drama “Back to Black” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some black people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: British singer Amy Winehouse becomes a Grammy-winning international superstar with her 2006 second album “Back to Black,” but her life is plagued by insecurities, drug addiction and a toxic relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, who would become her husband in a doomed marriage.

Culture Audience: “Back to Black” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Amy Winehouse, but the movie is mostly a superficial and glossed-over portrayal of her life.

Marisa Abela and Jack O’Connell in “Back to Black” (Photo by Dean Rogers/Focus Features)

The best things about the Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black” are Winehouse’s original songs, and the cast members put in very good efforts in their performances. But this disappointing drama does almost everything else wrong. It’s a movie that is so intent on glossing over harsh realities of Winehouse’s life, the results are very phony-looking recreations where the overall narrative of the movie can’t be trusted.

Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Matt Greenhalgh, “Back to Black” takes place in the 2000s, the decade when London-based Winehouse rose to fame as a gritty and sassy singer heavily influenced by American R&B and 1960s pop music. She also wrote very confessional songs about her life. Winehouse, who struggled with various addictions, died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, after having a period of sobriety. She was 27.

Marisa Abela has the role of Winehouse in “Back to Black” and does her own singing in the movie. Winehouse had a unique contralto that would be difficult for anyone to duplicate. Abela’s Winehouse impersonation is passable, but Abela’s singing is noticeably inferior to Winehouse’s real voice talent. (For the purposes of this review, the real Amy Winehouse is referred to as Winehouse, while the character of Amy Winehouse in “Back to Black” is referred to as Amy.)

“Back to Black” is a “checklist” celebrity biopic (with a lot of corny dialogue) that follows the usual formula of a celebrity who rises to fame and fortune and then comes crashing down because of various issues, usually having to do with addiction, money, egos, love life problems, or a combination of all of them. Movies like this usually end with some type of “redemption” or “triumph” arc. And if the celebrity is dead, the death and aftermath of the death are usually tacked on as an epilogue.

The “Back to Black” movie follows Amy’s transformation from a guitar-playing pop singer (whose 2003 debut album “Frank” was a big hit in the United Kingdom, but flopped everywhere else except Europe, Australia and Brazil) to ditching her guitar as part of her stage act (at the urging of her management), in order to become a sultrier R&B-influenced singer known for her 1960s-styled beehive hairstyle. The movie makes it look like Amy’s beloved grandmother Cynthia (played by Lesley Manville), the mother of Amy’s father, was largely responsible for Amy’s image makeover into a 1960s-inspired “bad girl” diva after Amy showed an interest in 1960s music.

Amy is encouraged and enabled by her taxi driver father Mitch (played by Eddie Marsan), who plays an increasingly influential role in her career. Amy meets Blake Fielder-Civil (played by Jack O’Connell) at a pub, and they have a volatile on-again, off-again relationship that leads to them eloping in 2007. Blake doesn’t seem to have a steady job (he describes himself as a video assistant when he first meets Amy), but he is a full-time drug addict, with Amy also indulging in the same addictions, including alcohol, cocaine and heroin. The movie’s depictions of Amy’s self-admitted eating disorders, self-harm and rehab stints are mostly superficial and fleeting.

The well-documented physical abuse in Amy and Blake’s relationship is only hinted at in the “Back to Black” movie, in a scene where Amy is seen running away in the street with bruises and cuts on her face and body. Amy is shown with some friends in the beginning of her career, but those friends eventually fade away in the movie and are replaced by Blake and people who work for Amy. Mark Ronson—one of the main producers of her breakthrough 2006 second (and last) studio album “Back to Black”—is mentioned but never seen in the movie. The same goes for Simon Fuller, the owner of 19 Management, the company that is most famous for managing the Spice Girls and Amy Winehouse.

The “Back to Black” movie sidelines Amy’s songwriting talent, her work in recording studios and her concert tours, in order to make the majority of the story about the dysfunctional relationship between Amy and Blake. The movie makes it look like Amy was much more in love with Blake than he was with her. And that is probably true. In real life, the “Back to Black” album was written during a period of time when Winehouse and Fielder-Civil had broken up, before they got married. Their marriage lasted only two years.

The movie only shows the stories behind only a few of her songs. The inspiration for “Rehab,” her biggest hit, is in a scene where Amy’s manager Nick Shymansky (played by Sam Buchanan) and other people in her entourage have an intervention to urge her to go to rehab, but Amy says “no,” and Mitch backs her up and says she’s just fine. In real life, Shymansky has given interviews saying that Mitch originally agreed to convince Amy to go to rehab during this intervention, but Mitch went back on his word and ended up by siding with Amy. By all accounts, Amy Winehouse in real life was not “just fine” when she recorded the “Back to Black” album but she was actually deep in the throes of addiction, which the movie constantly glosses over by downplaying how serious her addictions were.

The “Back to Black” movie dishonestly makes it look like paparazzi had more to do with Amy’s downfall during the height of her fame, instead of all the enablers (including her father Mitch) who pushed her to go on tour when she didn’t want to tour and she should have been getting necessary and proper medical care for her health issues. Amy’s mother Janis (played by Juliet Cowan), who separated from Mitch when Amy was 9, is depicted in the movie as mostly a passive bystander. Amy’s older brother Alex (played by Izaak Cainer), who was four years older than she was, is barely in the movie.

The movie dutifully recreates one of the high points in Amy’s career: the 2008 Grammy Awards, when Amy performed “Rehab” from London and then won the Grammy for Record of the Year for “Rehab,” with her parents in the audience cheering her on. She won a total of five Grammys at the ceremony, including Song of the Year (also for “Rehab”); Best Pop Vocal Album (for “Back to Black”); Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for “Rehab”); and Best New Artist. She became the first British female artist to win all of these Grammy Awards in the same ceremony.

Taylor-Johnson and Greenhalgh previously worked together on the John Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy” (about Lennon’s troubled teenage years), a drama released in 2009 in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, and in 2010 everywhere else. Greenhalgh also wrote the screenplay for the 2007 biopic “Control,” a drama about Ian Curtis, lead singer of the British rock band Joy Division. Just like the “Back to Black” movie, “Nowhere Boy” and “Control” also had good performances in a movie with a very flawed screenplay. Although “Back to Black” certainly does an admirable job with costume design, production design and hairstyling, viewers are better off watching the Oscar-winning 2015 documentary “Amy” for a more insightful and more accurate story of Winehouse’s life.

Focus Features will release “Back to Black” in U.S. cinemas on May 17, 2024, with a sneak preview in U.S. cinemas on May 15, 2024. The movie was released in the United Kingdom and other countries in April 2024. “Back to Black” will be released on digital and VOD on June 4, 2024.

Review: ‘She Is Love,’ starring Haley Bennett and Sam Riley

February 7, 2023

by Carla Hay

“She Is Love”

Directed by Jamie Adams

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in an unnamed city in England, the dramatic film “She Is Love” features an all-white cast of characters representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: Two former spouses, who haven’t seen or spoken to each other in 10 years, have an awkward reunion when she checks into the inn where he lives with his current girlfriend, who owns the inn.

Culture Audience: “She Is Love” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching aimless movies that have no real plot and mainly show people looking and acting uncomfortable with each other.

Marisa Abela in “She Is Love” (Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media)

Everything about the rambling drama “She Is Love” looks like an improvisational sketch that was dragged into an unnecessary and tedious movie. The cast members are talented, but the characters they play are empty and annoying. The movie’s fake-looking ending looks like a lazy cop-out that doesn’t ring true. It’s one of many misguided aspects of this dreadfully dull film.

Written and directed by Jamie Adams, “She Is Love” had its world premiere at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival. The movie takes place in an unnamed city in England, primarily at one location: a bed-and-breakfast inn. In the beginning of the movie, it’s a Friday, and a restless woman named Patricia (played by Haley Bennett), who also goes by the name Pat, has arrived at the inn because her boyfriend Taylor (voiced by Jay Jippet) has booked a room for her at the inn.

Patricia is a creator of TV shows, and she travels a lot for her job. It’s vaguely explained that she’s at the inn on some sort of vacation where she wants to spend some time alone. The movie’s story begins on a Friday and ends on a Sunday. By the end of this weekend, Patricia will not only have the opposite of a vacation of solitude, she’s also so “in your face” irritating, viewers of “She Is Love” will want to Patricia to go away.

The first thing that Patricia does when she checks into her room is complain. She mutters to herself, “This room is ugly.” It doesn’t take long before her so-called restful vacation gets interrupted by loud music coming from another room. Patricia goes to the source of the noise and sees a musician named Idris (played by Sam Riley) playing music on DJ equipment, as if he’s in a nightclub. Idris and Patricia look at each other in shock. She’s so in shock, she quickly walks out of the room.

Idris follows her and says, “I’m sorry about the noise. I didn’t know anyone was here.” Patricia says to him, “What are you doing here?” Idris replies, “I kind of live here. I can’t believe it. The last I heard, you were living in America.” It’s soon revealed how Patricia and Idris know each other: They used to be married to each other, they got divorced, and they haven’t seen or spoken to each other in about 10 years.

Patricia insists that she’s at this inn purely as a coincidence, because her boyfriend booked the room at the inn for her. More awkwardness ensues because the person who owns the inn and lives there too is Idris’ current girlfriend Louise (played by Marisa Abela), a perky aspiring actress who’s about 15 years younger than 39-year-old Idris. Quicker than you can say “formulaic sitcom idea,” Louise suddenly comes home to tell Idris the good news that she got a role that she really wanted. Idris nervously steers Louise outside and doesn’t want her to go inside until he tells her the news that his ex-wife unexpectedly showed up and is staying at the inn.

Idris tells Louise it’s a bizarre coincidence that Patricia is a guest at the inn, and he assures Louise that nothing is going to happen between him and Patricia. And what a coincidence: Louise has to go out of town for a few days because of this new acting job. The rest of the movie shows what happens when Patricia and Idris spend a lot of time alone together, get drunk, and act like people who have too much time on their hands but have nothing meaningful to say for most of that time. It’s all just so boring to watch.

Bennett and Riley seem to be attempting to make Patricia and Idris believable as an ex-couple with unresolved feelings for each other. The problem is that it never looks genuine that these two were ever in love. Anything that’s supposed to pass for “sexual tension” between Patricia and Idris just come across as forced. And to make matters worse, insufferable Patricia is so insulting to Idris, it’s even harder to believe that Idris could possibly be falling back in love with her.

In one of their early “reunion” conversations, Idris (who performs in a semi-famous rock band) tells Patricia that he’s still a musician. Patricia rudely says, “So, you’re doing the same thing. I’m a bit disappointed.” It’s quite the display of disrespectful and condescending judgment from someone who has no say in how Idris should lead his life and what should make him happy.

Later, when Idris and Patricia have a drunken argument, she says to him: “You can’t deal with anyone broken. That’s why you go for Louise.” Irdrs replies, “You break everything you touch!” And then, Patricia shows how cruel she can be when she says to Idris: “The only good thing about you is your dad. And he’s dead.”

“She Is Love” is a misnomer, because Patricia is not a very loving or lovable person. The movie becomes a slog of Patricia and Idris lurching from drunken activity to drunken activity, all while having witless conversations. They play tennis while intoxicated. They put on face powder, wear white clothes, and run around the inn, as they pretend that they are ghosts.

And (cliché alert), at one point, Idris brings out his acoustic guitar and plays a drippy love song about you-know-who. And through it all, Idris and Patricia continue to argue. It’s as if Patricia and Idris are trying to convince themselves that maybe they’re smart and interesting, but the results prove that they are just the opposite.

Another thing that looks phony about this movie is that for an inn of this size (it looks like there are at about six to eight bedrooms), no one seems to be taking care of this property except Louise and Idris. There are no signs of any maids, caretakers, maintenance workers or cooks. Even if business is slow, it’s hard to believe that Louise and Idris are doing all the physical upkeep of this property all by themselves.

Louise is preoccupied with auditions, while Idris just seems to lounge around the inn and play music when he’s in between gigs. The inn has one quasi-receptionist named Kate (played by Rosa Robson), who walks around with a clipboard and doesn’t seem to do much. Kate certainly isn’t scrubbing toilets, cleaning up the yard, or fixing broken equipment.

It’s an example of how the filmmakers of “She Is Love” couldn’t adequately make a cinematic experience from this very poorly conceived story that has a virtually non-existent plot. At best, “She Is Love” is a story that should have been a very short sketch. It’s too bad that the filmmakers decided to pad it with too much shallow filler and make it into a very disappointing 82-minute movie.

Brainstorm Media released “She Is Love” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on February 3, 2023.