Is there another contemporary filmmaker whose work swings as unpredictably between the seductive and the alienating as does Steven Soderbergh's?

| Jul 6, 2010

Bubble is best considered as a failed-but-occasionally-nifty experiment.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Nov 27, 2006

The local atmosphere, filmed on the Ohio-West Virginia border, is rigorously authentic and so is the cast, none of whose members have acted before.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 14, 2006

I was blown away.

| Jun 24, 2006

These conversations are about as deadly dull as any dialogue I've ever heard even in the earliest talkies.

| Feb 8, 2006

Soderbergh's use of the new technology makes this situation work.

Full Review | Feb 7, 2006

Soderbergh holds up a mirror to these lives of quiet desperation and shows us how unquiet they can be.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Feb 4, 2006

Bubble is likely to be remembered more for its method of manufacture and release than for any inherent qualities of its own.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 4, 2006

As the plot unfolded along the lines of a conventional melodrama, I couldn't help thinking: In addition to health care and a living wage, don't the working poor deserve makeup, wardrobe, decent lighting, and some heart-skipping drama?

| Jan 27, 2006

The result is haunting and often creepy in its realism.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 27, 2006

Proves that in the hands of a director with an artist's eye for telling details, a wholly original story revealing the complexity and, yes, bizarreness of human nature trumps star power every time.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 27, 2006

A deadpan commentary on the emptiness of middle-American life, and Soderbergh manages to pull this off without condescending to the characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 27, 2006

A simple yet oddly profound tale of banal blue-collar lives shattered by an impulsive crime.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 27, 2006

Soderbergh uses the mechanics of the grimy doll factory ... as metaphor, carefully tracking the shiny distractions we hide behind, revealing the awful little facts about their glued-on eyelashes and the identically blank faces they all start out with.

| Original Score: B | Jan 27, 2006

It's an exceedingly simple drama that -- if you give yourself over to it -- can have a hypnotic effect.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 27, 2006

Tests the idea that the mundane becomes ominous if studied in enough detail.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 27, 2006

At times it's so mind-numbingly dull, it becomes funny. But it's not a feature film. I'm not really sure what it is.

| Jan 27, 2006

Soderbergh has made an experiment worth seeing, but how much do you want to bet his actors have richer lives than the characters they're playing, even if those lives look just as ordinary?

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 27, 2006

A haunting film, made all the more intriguing by the use of ordinary people, not actors, in all the roles.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 26, 2006

Soderbergh and screenwriter Coleman Hough aren't interested in creating a coy whodunit so much as evoking the deeper, less romantic mysteries of people -- and it's riveting.

| Jan 26, 2006