As with Kimi and Unsane, Soderbergh occasionally has more fun with the constraints than we do. There’s nothing as compelling or creepy as Kristen Stewart’s dance with the unseen in Personal Shopper.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 28, 2025

I love that after all these decades as a filmmaker, Soderbergh still likes to do these cool little experimental larks.

| Feb 11, 2025

It's a gimmick... But it's a good gimmick, not one I had really seen before.

| Feb 11, 2025

'Presence' squanders the talents of David Koepp and Steven Soderbergh in a lifeless, cliché-ridden ghost story that delivers neither scares nor suspense.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 11, 2025

It’s a highly controlled piece of filmmaking and the climax is incredibly scary. I can’t say it has me believing in ghosts, but it does put the case with a disarming sophistication.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 8, 2025

If the downside of working as fast as Soderbergh does is how scrappy the films sometimes feel, here the rough finish fits the form: a smart quick-fire frightener from a ghost in the Hollywood machine.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 4, 2025

It's an interesting genre experiment.

| Feb 1, 2025

Soderbergh remains the consummate tactician. He might be playing with POV, but there’s nothing prankish about his approach, only purposeful.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 1, 2025

Presence has the story, limited scope, and 85-minute runtime of a 1940s B-picture, infused—as those pictures often were—with a disciplined style and contemporary electricity.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 31, 2025

What makes Presence less than engaging as a drama—I’d hardly call this a horror movie, even though it’s marketed as one—is its focus on adhering to its setting’s limitations.

| Jan 30, 2025

It’s a curio, all the same, and certainly not a bad time. You can rely on Soderbergh for getting texture and grit out of his actors.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 30, 2025

As fascinating as the film is in technical form, it’s screenwriter David Koepp’s script that makes “Presence” a real draw. His writing is thorny and cuts deceptively deep, like a scrape that looks like a surface wound until it won’t stop bleeding.

| Jan 27, 2025

[Steven Soderbergh's] latest, Presence, shares a fair amount in common with Unsane (2018) and Kimi (2022) -- clean, simple premises tied primarily to a single location, yet giddy with possibility.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 27, 2025

Presence, like much of the director’s recent work, is less an entrée than a charming apéritif, albeit with a couple of smart twists worth ruminating on.

| Jan 27, 2025

Soderbergh is such an assured film-maker, and so clear with his camera movements (he operated the camera throughout), that the film gradually acquires an eerie intimacy and a palpable sense of the ghost’s, well, presence.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2025

It’s fascinating to watch Soderbergh continue to stretch himself creatively, and prove the worth of inventive and innovative modes of filmmaking. It’s just a question of whether the scripts are any good.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 26, 2025

It’s so compact, smart, and elegant that it feels quietly momentous. Without handing everything over, it gives you all you need.

| Jan 26, 2025

While it’s an interesting exercise, it’s more of a teasing puzzle than a nail-biter. What’s more, it’s a puzzle that appears to have lost a few key pieces between the immaculately sanded floorboards.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 26, 2025

“Presence” is less of a horror movie or even a traditional ghost story than a drama about personal morality, responsibility, self-inquiry, and personal evolution, told from the perspective of someone who’s not alive anymore.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 25, 2025

Terrifically edited, shot and acted, Presence is smart, minimalist, contemporary, unironic -- and scary as hell

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2025