BLACK BAG is a scathingly brilliant take on truth, lies, and the sanctity of marriage, and the perfect vehicle for Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. A good marriage that is, such as the one enjoyed by George Woodhouse (Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett), British spies with the highest security clearance They are the perfect… Read More »
PRESENCE
Steven Soderbergh’s signature style is one of cool detachment to his characters. His films tackle people in crisis, but the tone is always one of an ersatz cinema verité witness to what is happening to them. In PRESENCE, he has channeled that aesthetic into a ghost story told from the spirit’s point of view. Literally.… Read More »
UNSANE
For me, the single most disconcerting image in a Steven Soderbergh film is from CONTAGION. It’s not a panorama of people dying from the pandemic that threatens to end civilization as we know it, instead it’s the silent, dispassionately clinical shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being autopsied. There are people I know who reference the… Read More »
LOGAN LUCKY
Transposing the milieu from glitz to grits, Steven Soderbergh’s LOGAN LUCKY does more set an intricate heist flick in the backroads of Appalachia, it also makes a sly statement about class, culture, and our preconceived notions about those two things. It also has something that most Soderbergh films lack for all their visual impact: heart.… Read More »
INFORMANT!, THE
There is something poignantly human in the way that everyone in Steven Soderberghs INFORMANT!, comedy of corporate greed and earnest FBI investigation, so completely believes in what they want to see going right in front of their eyes. The kicker is that the prime mover in all of this, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), is so… Read More »
CONTAGION
Steven Soderbergh begins CONTAGION with a black screen, the sound of a cough, and, when the picture comes up on screen, the caption Day 2 in appropriately lurid red letters. The cough belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow, one of the legion of stars that shuffle through this sprawling tale of social devolution, and in a nicely… Read More »
HAYWIRE
Its interesting that the unsmiling, kick-ass heroine of HAYWIRE, Mallory, Mal for short, doesnt go directly to the one move uniquely efficient in taking down a male combatant. It speaks, no doubt, to her sense of honor and her belief in a fair fight. A belief that people challenge at their own risk to their… Read More »
SOLARIS
In a move as audacious as it is disastrous, Steve Soderbergh has decided to push the edges of what filmmaking can be and created in SOLARIS not so much a motion picture as a still life. One that is more sleep-inducing than a warm glass of milk and a bottle of Seconal. It is remarkable… Read More »
SIDE EFFECTS
The great problem with talking about Steven Soderberghs latest (and putatively his last) film, SIDE EFFECTS, is that it would be criminal to give away any of the fiendishly clever plot twists involved. This is an elegantly executed sleight-of-hand that hinges on something most people have never thought about: why is it, exactly, that we… Read More »