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

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

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

Traffic is exemplary Hollywood social realism.

| Sep 7, 2023

This is Hollywood filmmaking at its best: an enjoyable, inventive, and clever 147-minute bounce on the puffy, coke-white underbelly of American executive power.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 6, 2023

To be frank, it's a downer. But an engrossing downer, with a multitude of revelatory stories springing out of performances, characters, dialogue or social setting and recalling what American movie making was like in its entertaining but serious prime.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 6, 2023

The film's pace, elliptical narrative style and sheer audacity are a combination to trigger an adrenaline rush in audiences. And in Soderbergh, the film boasts a director of seemingly limitless imagination.

| Sep 6, 2023

The movie's undoubted star is Benicio Del Toro as Javier Rodriguez... This is a riveting performance from Del Toro: understated, flintily tough, reticent and finally, infinitely weary and battle scared.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2023

The stories cover supply, demand, addiction, treatment, corruption, enforcement, courts, and policy-making, and Soderbergh keeps all of it flowing with the pace of a thriller.

| Sep 6, 2023

That's Traffic's problem in a nutshell. Soderbergh has grabbed onto fascinating material. But for some reason he seems afraid to give his audience a real high.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2023

Traffic is a strong film that I could have been a fantastic one if it didn't keep getting detoured.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 6, 2023

This is the rare film that neither aims to entertain nor incite. The basis of the profound uncertainty it evokes qualifies Traffic as an important movie, and the basis of its technical achievement qualifies it as a great one.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 6, 2023

With three interlinked yet separate stories... it seems like the kind of project that shouldn't have worked at all. Yet Soderbergh's palpable, almost physical connection to the filmmaking process unifies the picture.

| Sep 6, 2023

The most exciting and complexly imagined American movie of the year.

| Sep 6, 2023

Traffic has three overlapping narratives, none terribly novel, but the shivery camerawork and odd juxtapositions keep you off-balance.

| Sep 6, 2023