A funny thing happened as I was assembling this rundown of Steven Soderbergh’s feature films and documentaries. I realized he might be my favourite American filmmaker. Not just my favourite living American filmmaker or my favourite working American filmmaker – my favourite American filmmaker, period.
Of the 26 titles listed below, only a handful didn’t leave me itching to rewatch them as I wrote about them.
Soderbergh’s been described as a chilly, clinical filmmaker, but I don’t think that’s fair. He’s an intelligent storyteller, and even when he’s making sillier, fluffier films – like, say the Ocean’s trilogy, which he once described as the closest he’ll ever come to making superhero movies – he refuses to condescend. Some of his movies are more cerebral than others, but none of them are lazy or half-assed. I’ve said this a dozen times over the years: Soderbergh’s misfires are more interesting than most directors’ successes.
And with the arrival of Logan Lucky marking his return to features after several years, we thought we’d take a look at his output and stack ’em against one another.
Just remember, this isn’t a best-to-worst kind of list. I love pretty much all of these movies, so it’s more of a best-to-slightly-less-best-to-eventually-we-get-to-Side Effects kind of list.
1. The Limey (1999)
Terence Stamp gives the performance of his career as Wilson, the hardest of hard men, newly arrived in Los Angeles to determine if his daughter’s death was really an accident. Soderbergh places that performance in a film that’s as lean and mean as its antihero, moving shark-like through the broken promises of 60s idealism, the sour side of Hollywood glamour and the pain of a man pushing further and further into this mystery so he can channel his grief into rage. Lem Dobbs’s script offers fine roles for Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren and the wonderful Luis Guzmán, and Soderbergh repurposes a clip of the young Stamp from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow for a closing moment that’s just heartbreakingly perfect.
2. Out Of Sight (1998)
Elmore Leonard’s tale of a bank robber and a federal marshal who fall for one another while chasing each other across the country offered Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Frank the opportunity to make a mature love story that’s also a crackling, sexy thriller. George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez are perfectly paired in the leads, with terrific support provided from Steve Zahn, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson. It’s just as good as The Limey and offers many of the same delights – a scrambled chronology, a gorgeous visual aesthetic, a screenplay that expertly folds melancholy meaning into the body of a conventional thriller – with a more romantic vibe. Why choose? Love them both.
3. The Informant! (2009)
Soderbergh, Matt Damon and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns turn Kurt Eichenwald’s book about Mark Whitacre, an agribusiness executive who exposed a massive price-fixing scandal in the 90s, into a magnificent farce about the worst informant in the history of criminal investigation. Damon is perfection, the human embodiment of Marvin Hamlisch’s burbling retro score. Every role is cast with a comic performer, giving the story an even stranger energy. The details of Whitacre’s involvement are insanely complicated, but also factually accurate. And the ending? Well, the ending is magnificent.
4. Solaris (2002)
George Clooney credited Soderbergh with forcing him to abandon his 90s tics in Out Of Sight, and the two formed a creative partnership that lasted most of a decade. This is one of the highlights, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi head trip that backgrounds the awe and wonder to focus on the emotional dilemma of the man at its centre, a psychologist sent to investigate strange events on a space station orbiting an alien world – and given a second chance with his dead wife (Natascha McElhone). Its failure to set the box office on fire after Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven did such great business led people to label it a flop. But it’s a masterpiece it was just ahead of its time.
5. Contagion (2011)
Tracking the institutional response to a superflu burning through America – and the human factor that complicates every stage of that response – Soderbergh assembles one of his all-time best casts (including Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Jennifer Ehle, Marion Cotillard and John Hawkes) for a thriller as convincing as it is merciless.
6. Sex, Lies, And Videotape (1989)
Soderbergh’s first feature came out of nowhere to win the audience award at Sundance and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, ushering in the era of the American art house indie. It told a simple story about four people (James Spader, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo, Andie MacDowell) caught in each other’s orbits in a sexy, cool way. And it was funny. Now, of course, we know what a Steven Soderbergh movie looks and feels like. But back then, it was a revelation.
7. Traffic (2000)
Just months after Erin Brockovich came this ambitious, multi-character study of people on various sides of the American war on drugs, with Soderbergh taking a British television series and turning it into a colour-coded epic told in multiple countries and languages. Nominated for five Oscars, it won four: Benicio Del Toro won best supporting actor, Stephen Gaghan won best adapted screenplay and Stephen Mirrione won best film editing, and Soderbergh himself was named best director. (He was also up for directing Erin Brockovich it was a good year.) The best picture prize went to Gladiator, but everyone makes mistakes.
8. Erin Brockovich (2000)
Out Of Sight and The Limey delighted critics, but neither film did great at the box office. No worries, Soderbergh’s next picture not only made a bundle but won Julia Roberts a well-deserved Oscar for her performance as the eponymous single mother who leads a charge against an indifferent California power company that’s poisoning the residents of a small town. Soderbergh demonstrates that he can fulfill all the requirements of mainstream entertainment without compromising himself or the material – not that Susannah Grant’s script was compromised to begin with, mind you.
9. Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
I think it’s safe to say the entire industry did a double-take when Soderbergh announced he’d be following Erin Brockovich and Traffic with a remake of an old Rat Pack heist picture, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the roles created by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. But the result is an energetic delight, a glistening studio production that zips from one charming scene to the next, gives everybody in its massive cast a chance to shine and can be enjoyed even after you know where the twists fall. It’s like eating an entire bag of candy without any of the ill effects.
10. King Of The Hill (1993)
Lost for almost two decades after Soderbergh effectively disowned it in the mid-90s, this adaptation of A.E. Hotchner’s memoir of a Depression-era childhood is a moving, delicate study of people at their best when things are at their worst. A young Jesse Bradford plays Hotchner’s alter-ego Aaron Kurlander, who cares for his little brother when their father leaves them in St. Louis. The film is an exercise in empathy, with Soderbergh putting us right alongside Aaron as his resilience and courage are pushed to the very limit. Finally rescued from limbo by the Criterion Collection three years ago and immediately rediscovered by cinephiles, it’s an essential part of his filmography.
11. Ocean’s Twelve (2004)
Soderbergh’s first sequel to his 2001 blockbuster plays a masterful game of bait-and-switch, setting up another flawless heist and then throwing Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and half his crew in jail, forcing insecure Linus (Matt Damon) to figure out a new plan on the fly, one that requires Danny’s girlfriend Tess (Julia Roberts) to exploit her striking resemblance to famous movie star Julia Roberts. Also, Vincent Cassel is a hoot as the new bad guy, a master thief who’s also a world-class dick. People hated it. They were wrong.
12. Magic Mike (2012)
Yeah, it’s a movie about male strippers goofing around with knockout performances from Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey, but there’s also a thoughtful meditation on economic anxiety hiding underneath Soderbergh’s smash hit, which he described succinctly as “a movie about what people will do for money.” The sequel – produced, shot and edited by Soderbergh, but directed by longtime collaborator Gregory Jacobs – is pretty great, too.
13. Behind The Candelabra (2013)
Made for HBO and screened at Cannes, which is as theatrical as it gets, this biopic about the relationship between an aging Liberace (Michael Douglas) and wide-eyed kid Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) is a master class in small details and big performances, with Soderbergh finding layer after layer of irony and tragedy in Richard LaGravenese’s script.
Sasha Grey in 2009’s The Girlfriend Experience
14. The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
Eyebrows were raised when Soderbergh cast adult-film star Sasha Grey in a movie about prostitution, but the resulting drama – about an escort who specializes in the eponymous service, which is complicating her relationship with a personal trainer (Chris Santos) – is a reserved, cerebral examination of various levels of exploitation, and a clear antecedent for Magic Mike.
15. And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)
Six years after Spalding Gray’s 2004 suicide, Soderbergh and editor Susan Littenberg brought him back to life with this collage of videotaped performances, turning years of material into a single summary monologue. A loving tribute to a friend who left us too soon.
16. Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)
The postmodernist spin of Ocean’s Twelve rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, so Soderbergh returned to straight-up candy with the final chapter of the trilogy, reuniting most of the team (minus Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who are missed) to take down Al Pacino’s jerkoff casino kingpin. It may not have the go-for-broke, hall-of-mirrors genius of the last one, but it does have Matt Damon seducing Ellen Barkin while wearing a ridiculous fake nose.
Gina Carano and Channing Tatum go totally Haywire.
17. Haywire (2011)
Soderbergh’s sole action movie to date casts MMA fighter Gina Carano as a spy running for her life after a job goes bad. It’s your basic Jason Bourne scenario, and while the dramatic scenes are hampered slightly by Carano’s inexperience as an actor, the action sequences are amazing, with Soderbergh shooting long, clear takes that showcase the dazzling fight choreography. Also, I’m pretty sure Michael Fassbender is playing James Bond.
18. Schizopolis (1996)
After his experiences on The Underneath drove him out of Hollywood, Soderbergh doubled down on Dadaism with a giddy, self-financed experimental narrative in which he played two characters in two separate storylines that may or may not be connected. It’s kind of like The Matrix, in that you can’t really understand it until you see it for yourself. But otherwise it isn’t like The Matrix at all.
19. The Underneath (1995)
Soderbergh’s experiences making this pulp thriller – an adaptation of Don Tracy’s Criss Cross, previously filmed in 1949 with Burt Lancaster, starring Sex, Lies, And Videotape’s Peter Gallagher as an Austin stooge who gets wrapped up in an armoured car robbery that goes very wrong – led him to walk away from studio work for a while. It’s a little on the cool side, but it’s a simmering, stylish exercise in tension that also finds Soderbergh experimenting with the time-scrambling approach he’d later use in Out Of Sight and The Limey.
20. Full Frontal (2002)
An ensemble drama about the entangled lives of a few people in Los Angeles – among them a movie star (Julia Roberts), a producer (David Duchovny), an actor (Blair Underwood), an executive (Catherine Keener) and a journalist (David Hyde Pierce) – that’s also a meta-textual exercise in mixing film and digital as well as scripted and improvised scenes. It was dismissed as one of Soderbergh’s weird experiments that just happened to star a bunch of famous people. Which it is, I guess, but it’s still pretty entertaining.
21. Kafka (1991)
A debut as seismic as Sex, Lies, And Videotape let Soderbergh do whatever the hell he wanted for his follow-up – so of course he picked a script by Lem Dobbs (who would write The Limey and Haywire) that most people considered unfilmable. A surrealistic fiction about the author Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) stumbling upon a conspiracy stranger and more sinister than anything he could ever invent, it was way too weird for audiences at the time – but it’s weird in a really compelling way, and ripe for rediscovery should Soderbergh ever get around to re-releasing it.
22. Ché (2008)
Originally conceived and shot as two separate features – The Argentine, which jumps back and forth over about a decade of Ché Guevara’s life, his relationship with Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, and Guerilla, which focuses on the final months of his life in Bolivia – Ché became a single work when Soderbergh brought it to Cannes as an epic to be screened over four and a half hours. It’s vivid and watchable, but it never gets inside its subject despite a charismatic performance from Benicio Del Toro, we learn next to nothing about Ché, who’s so committed to the revolution that he’s cast aside all personal and emotional attachments, moving from one battle to the next with the confidence of a true believer. Or a martyr.
23. The Good German (2006)
Adapting Joseph Kanon’s novel about an American journalist drawn into a web of intrigue in Berlin immediately after the fall of Hitler, Soderbergh didn’t just want to make a movie set in 1945 – he wanted to make a movie as if it actually was 1945, with all the restrictions of the period. (He even shot it to be presented in the 4:3 Academy ratio, though it rarely was.) It’s an interesting idea, but it doesn’t quite serve the material, which Soderbergh and screenwriter Paul Attanasio adapt as though it was a stealth Casablanca remake. George Clooney and Cate Blanchett look great in black-and-white, though, and Tobey Maguire does some interesting things in the background as a dirtbag GI working as Clooney’s driver.
24. Gray’s Anatomy (1996)
Soderbergh directs the film version of a monologue by Spalding Gray – whom he’d cast in a key role in King Of The Hill three years earlier – in which the writer/performer relates a chain of events that begins with blurry vision and ends with a full-blown confrontation with his own mortality. (Also, eye surgery.) It’s the one film of Soderbergh’s that bears his fewest signatures, but that’s not a bad thing Soderbergh’s just getting out of the way and serving the material.
25. Bubble (2005)
Soderbergh made Bubble so he could play with the possibilities of high-definition digital cinema (long takes! rock-solid images!), and explore alternate options to the standard theatrical release window: the movie debuted in theatres, on disc and on VOD services on the same day, allowing audiences to watch it however they liked. The experiment was undermined by the movie, however, which was cast entirely with unknowns and told the decidedly unsexy story of a murder at a Midwestern doll factory. (An Ocean’s movie might have made more of an impact, but that was never going to happen.) It’s not bad, exactly, but neither is it especially good.
Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones produce some intriguing Side Effects.
26. Side Effects (2013)
This middling riff on 90s thrillers – starring Rooney Mara as a woman who murders her husband under the influence of antidepressants – might not be Soderbergh’s worst movie, but it’s definitely one of his least engaging, its elaborate plot undermined by obvious twists and one awfully hammy performance from Catherine Zeta-Jones as a really terrible therapist.
