It is a legitimately epic film. [Full review in Spanish]

| Sep 8, 2023

Soderbergh's film uses a level-headed approach. It watches, it observes, it does not do much editorializing. The hopelessness of anti-drug measures is brought home through practical scenarios, not speeches and messages -- except for a few.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 8, 2023

Steven Soderbergh's great, despairing squall of a film, Traffic, may be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's Nashville to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid-washed palette.

| Sep 8, 2023

Benicio Del Toro... has the film actor's state of grace: he charms while he acts, not by trying to charm.

| Sep 8, 2023

Soderbergh's movie is so full of action and event, it's not easy to signal out the most brilliant moments.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 8, 2023

[It's] a complex, compelling ensemble drama about the morass that is the drug problem in this country today. Working at the top of his game and with a superior cast, director Steven Soderbergh vividly presents several distinct but interconnected stories.

| Sep 8, 2023

In an ensemble of more than a dozen major roles and a hundred speaking roles, not a single performance misfires. [A stand-out is] Del Toro, whose quiet, intent, soulful performance should at last make him a star (if there is justice in this world).

| Sep 8, 2023

Enormously ambitious and masterfully made, Traffic represents docudrama-style storytelling at a very high level.

| Sep 8, 2023

Yet another indication of how accomplished a filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has become.

| Sep 8, 2023

Director Steven Soderbergh never lectures his audience; instead, he shows viewers the complexities and pensiveness of the illegal drug trade.

| Sep 7, 2023

Traffic's engines are already revved when it starts, with a drug bust in the Mexican desert, and it careers through its multiple stories with a documentary-style urgency that never lets up.

| Sep 7, 2023

The pulsing heart of Traffic lies in the predicament of Del Toro’s Javier Rodriguez, an honest cop in a tangled web of graft.

| Sep 7, 2023

Traffic, with its carefully modulated stories and experimentation with various stocks and filters, mixes a Hollywood sense of scale with indie grit.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2023

The director [Soderbergh] methodically builds each story to a satisfactory conclusion. It's vibrant storytelling from a filmmaker on a roll.

| Sep 7, 2023

Even as it ably dramatizes the pervasiveness of drugs in modern America... it puts the epochal social problem in a bright, shinning light for us to see it in a clear-eyed, bracing and sobering new way.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 7, 2023

What Soderbergh has done is texturize flat surfaces, creating a rather convincing illusion of something profound.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 7, 2023

Traffic is thrillingly alive. From the first frame to the last, the director would rather engage you, startle you with the vastness of his canvas, and offer his extraordinary movie as an antidote to gutless filmmaking.

| Sep 7, 2023

On almost every level, Traffic is a rich and provocative movie.

| Sep 7, 2023

Traffic is exemplary Hollywood social realism.

| Sep 7, 2023

Traffic is fearless and uncompromising in its power and simplicity.

| Sep 7, 2023