The Best Steven Soderbergh Movies, Definitively Ranked
CultureFrom star-studded Hollywood heist films to modern noir to sci-fi to wild metacinematic experiments, we've ranked the prolific output of a brilliant director who'll try anything once.By Jesse HassengerJanuary 24, 2025Warner Bros/Everett CollectionSave this storySaveSave this storySaveHere’s the good news: the best Steven Soderbergh movies are, in a sense, all the Steven Soderbergh movies; the fullness of his filmography, from little experiments to big, expensive studio movies, is a major component of its value. The man simply loves to work, and though each piece of work does not lead seamlessly into the next—see his astonishing seven different same-year double features for his range of fascinatingly matched and mismatched pairings—they do all start to feel like components of a larger project. It’s as if he’s working to make the contemporary equivalent of three or four years’ worth of output at any given golden-age Hollywood studio, only with his signature interests all over each individual film.As such, selecting, say, the ten best Steven Soderbergh movies would feel particularly incomplete, even if it would constitute nearly a third of his fiction-feature filmography. At the moment, he’s made significantly more narrative features than Martin Scorsese, and as many as Steven Spielberg; he’ll pass Spielberg in a couple of months. At his current rate, he shouldn’t have trouble exceeding Woody Allen’s 50 or so. Alfred Hitchcock may be out of reach—though passing Hitch's total sound-film output may be doable. Anyway, this is all to say that only a full ranking of Soderbergh’s many essential—and, occasionally, wonderfully inessential—fiction films will do. Trust the process.33. Schizopolis (1996)Steven Soderbergh broke through in a big way with the critically acclaimed arthouse hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape, released in 1989. By 1996, after three follow-ups in a row failed to make much of a dent with critics or audiences, he was in dire need of a hard reset; his response, for some reason, was to write, direct, and star in (!) this oddball project. Part sketch comedy, part parable, part satirical nightmare, Soderbergh shot Schizopolis in his hometown over a period of nine months—a surprisingly traditional gestation for the strangest child in his filmography. Befitting said filmography and its dedicated acolytes, there are hardcore Schizopolis-heads among us Soderbergheads. Confident that I’d probably join their ranks, I blind-bought the damn thing on Criterion DVD and—ah, well. It has its moments, but I personally prefer when Soderbergh’s freewheeling comic experiments are fronted by celebrities at risk of humiliating themselves. It’s a possibly-brilliant movie I’ll never watch again.32. Kafka (1991)Miramax/Everett CollectionMaybe we should withhold judgment on this one until Soderbergh officially releases his long-in-the-works recut of his sophomore feature, whose original version was released to critical and audience bafflement and is currently available mostly in illegal online streams. A black-and-white fictionalization of a biography of Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons), the movie may be the most failed of Soderbergh’s experiments; even Schizopolis succeeded in its goal to vex, mystify, and reset. It’s still a fascinating curio, and the recut, completely different, now-finished version entitled Mr. Kneff premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and garnered some appreciative notices. It’s apparently bound for a boxed-set release alongside other Soderbergh “B-sides.” Weirdly, this is the only fiction feature of Soderbergh’s pre-Out of Sight days that hasn’t been inducted into the Criterion Collection (though one of them snuck in as a special feature, not a main release), so it’s not as if its fellow Early Soderbergh pictures are in much need of rescuing. In any event, Soderbergh has generally resisted publicly tinkering with his old work, which makes Mr. Kneff seem worthy of anticipation.31. Erin Brockovich (2000)Universal/Everett CollectionSoderbergh’s return to commercial cinema—his first real wide-release big-studio movie, in fact— seemed like a slam-dunk: Out of Sight, an Elmore Leonard adaptation starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, about which more (much) later on this list. But that movie actually underperformed at the summer box office; Soderbergh’s first big $100 million hit came a couple of years later with this Julia Roberts-starring biographical procedural about a real-life crusader against ruinous pollution. Roberts won an Oscar for the title role, but here’s a weird revelation: the movie itself is kinda baggy, kinda shaggy, and doesn’t have nearly as much procedural zip as you’d expect from a master of the concise crime picture. As it turns out from its various immediate neighbors on this list, biopics, however unconventional, may not be his forte.30. Behind the Candelabra (2013)An HBO movie in the sheets but a theatrical release in the streets (of other countries), Soderbergh’s sorta-biopic f
Here’s the good news: the best Steven Soderbergh movies are, in a sense, all the Steven Soderbergh movies; the fullness of his filmography, from little experiments to big, expensive studio movies, is a major component of its value. The man simply loves to work, and though each piece of work does not lead seamlessly into the next—see his astonishing seven different same-year double features for his range of fascinatingly matched and mismatched pairings—they do all start to feel like components of a larger project. It’s as if he’s working to make the contemporary equivalent of three or four years’ worth of output at any given golden-age Hollywood studio, only with his signature interests all over each individual film.
As such, selecting, say, the ten best Steven Soderbergh movies would feel particularly incomplete, even if it would constitute nearly a third of his fiction-feature filmography. At the moment, he’s made significantly more narrative features than Martin Scorsese, and as many as Steven Spielberg; he’ll pass Spielberg in a couple of months. At his current rate, he shouldn’t have trouble exceeding Woody Allen’s 50 or so. Alfred Hitchcock may be out of reach—though passing Hitch's total sound-film output may be doable. Anyway, this is all to say that only a full ranking of Soderbergh’s many essential—and, occasionally, wonderfully inessential—fiction films will do. Trust the process.
Steven Soderbergh broke through in a big way with the critically acclaimed arthouse hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape, released in 1989. By 1996, after three follow-ups in a row failed to make much of a dent with critics or audiences, he was in dire need of a hard reset; his response, for some reason, was to write, direct, and star in (!) this oddball project. Part sketch comedy, part parable, part satirical nightmare, Soderbergh shot Schizopolis in his hometown over a period of nine months—a surprisingly traditional gestation for the strangest child in his filmography. Befitting said filmography and its dedicated acolytes, there are hardcore Schizopolis-heads among us Soderbergheads. Confident that I’d probably join their ranks, I blind-bought the damn thing on Criterion DVD and—ah, well. It has its moments, but I personally prefer when Soderbergh’s freewheeling comic experiments are fronted by celebrities at risk of humiliating themselves. It’s a possibly-brilliant movie I’ll never watch again.
Maybe we should withhold judgment on this one until Soderbergh officially releases his long-in-the-works recut of his sophomore feature, whose original version was released to critical and audience bafflement and is currently available mostly in illegal online streams. A black-and-white fictionalization of a biography of Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons), the movie may be the most failed of Soderbergh’s experiments; even Schizopolis succeeded in its goal to vex, mystify, and reset. It’s still a fascinating curio, and the recut, completely different, now-finished version entitled Mr. Kneff premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and garnered some appreciative notices. It’s apparently bound for a boxed-set release alongside other Soderbergh “B-sides.” Weirdly, this is the only fiction feature of Soderbergh’s pre-Out of Sight days that hasn’t been inducted into the Criterion Collection (though one of them snuck in as a special feature, not a main release), so it’s not as if its fellow Early Soderbergh pictures are in much need of rescuing. In any event, Soderbergh has generally resisted publicly tinkering with his old work, which makes Mr. Kneff seem worthy of anticipation.
Soderbergh’s return to commercial cinema—his first real wide-release big-studio movie, in fact— seemed like a slam-dunk: Out of Sight, an Elmore Leonard adaptation starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, about which more (much) later on this list. But that movie actually underperformed at the summer box office; Soderbergh’s first big $100 million hit came a couple of years later with this Julia Roberts-starring biographical procedural about a real-life crusader against ruinous pollution. Roberts won an Oscar for the title role, but here’s a weird revelation: the movie itself is kinda baggy, kinda shaggy, and doesn’t have nearly as much procedural zip as you’d expect from a master of the concise crime picture. As it turns out from its various immediate neighbors on this list, biopics, however unconventional, may not be his forte.
An HBO movie in the sheets but a theatrical release in the streets (of other countries), Soderbergh’s sorta-biopic follows a late-in-life Liberace (Michael Douglas) as he molds his younger lover (Matt Damon) into a doppelganger. It’s brilliantly acted by Douglas (who might have been in the Oscar conversation had this not been an HBO picture in the states) and Damon (right around the tipping point where he became Soderbergh’s most-frequent muse, beating out frequent collaborator George Clooney.) But it’s hard not to wonder if Soderbergh’s procedural precision is quite right for this material, which in some ways feels a bit more like Todd Haynes or Gus van Sant (or their cast-offs).
A sprawling two-part film about Che Guevara’s role in the Cuban Revolution (part one) and his attempt to start a revolution in Bolivia (part two) is one of Soderbergh’s most ambitious undertakings, and one of his least purely entertaining, setting star Benicio del Toro adrift in a series of sometimes chronologically scrambled episodes, often evocative but sometimes hard to follow. It’s an admirable bit of (still more) biographical filmmaking but represents one of the few times where Soderbergh’s smarts and attention to detail may have gotten the better of him.
Easily the least beloved of Soderbergh’s post-comeback movies, which is to say when he returned to directing features in 2017, The Laundromat reflects Soderbergh’s renewed focus on economics in his Trump-era films with a triptych of stories related to the Panama Papers. The easy comparison is The Big Short, with offshore bank accounts and shell companies swapped in for subprime mortgages; The Laundromat is less flashy but arguably more disciplined as an attempt to translate that material into a workable narrative. Despite contributions from Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, Gary Oldman, Sharon Stone, David Schwimmer, and Jeffrey Wright, it doesn’t entirely come off (especially one questionable casting choice). Still, it’s smart and ambitious enough to qualify as underrated.
A lot of the major filmmakers that came to prominence around the same time as Steven Soderbergh—the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino—positioned themselves as writer-directors. Soderbergh wrote and directed his indie-sensation debut about a couple (Andie MacDowell and Peter Gallagher), her sister (Laura San Giacomo), and the old friend/weirdo (James Spader) who destabilizes their lives, and even got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. But while Soderbergh’s control only increased as he eventually took control over editing and shooting his own films, his solo screenplay credits became fewer and further between. He obviously still exerts plenty of input on his movies’ stories through how they’re told (just ask Lem Dobbs, the Limey screenwriter who shares a contentious DVD commentary track with him), but doesn’t seem to put his energies into the writing process, perhaps sensing that it’s not his area of expertise.
Frankly, I think Sex, Lies, and Videotape bears that out; Soderbergh’s compositions frequently outshine the schematic characterization and stagey dialogue. (“Listen to the way you talk,” one sister says to the other at one point. “I talk fine,” she shoots back—just one stilted exchange of many that it would be easy to picture happening Off Broadway.) It may also be that the actor combinations, particularly Andie MacDowell and James Spader, are particularly ill-suited to this form of stylization. Whatever the reason, Soderbergh’s big-deal breakthrough plays, to me, more like an experiment than a lot of his later, supposedly minor genre forays.
There are a lot of genres represented in between the many crime movies that dot Soderbergh’s CV, but he hasn’t quite made a full-on musical yet. Magic Mike’s Last Dance—also his only non-Ocean’s sequel—is the closest he’s come, with Channing Tatum’s irrepressible (and still plenty-fit) exotic dancer coming out of gig-economy retirement to help his newest lady love (Salma Hayek Pinault) put on an all-male revue at a London theater she’s acquired during her recent divorce. It’s sillier and cornier than the original Magic Mike, and that’s precisely what makes it so unexpectedly charming.
One of Soderbergh’s most underrated projects is this early-DV comic exercise in movie-within-a-movie Hollywood satire and/or wankery; take your pick (though at one point, the wankery does threaten to become literal). Every mirror in this hall of ‘em doesn’t reveal something brilliant. They do, however, refract plenty of killer highlights, none greater than Soderbergh repertory player Nicky Katt as an actor playing Adolf Hitler and convinced, with Katt’s typically hilarious deadpan conviction, that it helps to drink a certain amount of blood every day.
The first 30-40 minutes of this meticulously produced black-and-white riff on 1940s noir and melodramas are about as striking (and, when some contemporary R-rated moments jut out from the story, weirdly funny) as anything Soderbergh has made, with a particularly juicy (and, mid-Spidey trilogy, wonderfully off-putting) role for Tobey Maguire. Leads George Clooney and Cate Blanchett seem to be fulfilling their Old Hollywood destiny by playing a reporter in postwar Europe and his missing ex, respectively, and they certainly look the parts; they’re ultimately undone by plotty convolutions that drain the passion from their scenes. It’s a sumptuous movie to look at, though, and it’s a shame that Soderbergh hasn’t worked in black-and-white since.
The Underneath is a remake of a classic but not overplayed noir called Criss Cross from underrecognized director Robert Siodmak, whose genre-hopping efficiency and skill with crime pictures in particular can, at times, bring to mind a kind of alt-universe studio-system Soderbergh. Soderbergh has made crime movies as good as Siodmak’s, and while this direct redo isn’t one of them, it feels like an important step in his evolution technically (lots of color-coded environments), narratively (scrambled chronology!), and thematically. All in all, it’s a solid ‘90s noir that might well count as a highlight of a lesser filmmaker’s career.
Side Effects served as a halfway (and ultimately temporary) farewell to Soderbergh’s career as a director of theatrical releases; Behind the Candelabra was released to HBO later in 2013, providing a transition point for the TV shows Soderbergh would work on in other capacities over the next few years. This is an admittedly strange finale even if it didn’t stick, a thriller that’s perhaps more ‘90s-coded than the actual noir he made in the ‘90s, with glamorous stars, absurd twists, and contemporary-culture currency in the form of a pharmaceutical-industry critique and, of course, nefarious corporate shenanigans. Of its central quartet of stars, repeat performers Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Channing Tatum have all been better in other Soderbergh projects. But one-and-done-so-far Rooney Mara gives one of her more memorable non-dragon-tattooed performances.
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American cinema’s most enjoyable wonk takes on the sports movie, and you know what? It kinda makes sense. Most of the best basketball movies are about the strange wheelings and dealings of the sport, and the toll that the big business exacts on the purity of the game. So it’s only natural that the Soderbergh version doesn’t have much in the way of court action; it’s all about a sports agent (André Holland) who uses a basketball lockout as an opportunity to figure out a new path forward for one of his major clients. The details can get a little dense—at times, the movie resembles a treatise on why the audience should really check out a provocative 1969 non-fiction book called The Revolt of the Black Athlete, particularly if the audience, uh, works in professional sports, I guess?—but Soderbergh’s iPhone-shot style makes it come alive, sort of like a roving, mobile play.
Soderbergh frequently winds up, intentionally or not, with single-year double features, and while the Bubble/Good German year of 2006 isn’t his best of those, it’s certainly his most striking contrast: gorgeous movie stars awash in Old Hollywood visuals in one, and nonpro actors doing digital-shot kitchen-sink realism in the other. Bubble just edges out the surprise win with its oppressive atmosphere, involving performances, and compact 73-minute running time as it chronicles a small-town murder involving the employees of a doll factory. Despite a milestone in VOD releasing—it played in theaters and on the satellite channel HDNet Movies simultaneously, with a DVD released just days after its commercial premiere—it’s likely one of his least-seen movies, and well worth seeking out.
Audiences paid to see a fun sequel to Ocean’s 11, one of the most slickly crowd-pleasing star-ensemble heist pictures of recent years, or maybe ever; instead, they were treated to a more lavish version of the self-referential and sometimes self-satisfied Full Frontal, a movie they had likely neither seen nor heard of. Classic Soderbergh! It really is, though, in its way, and is also very much an Ocean’s picture, in that it is composed largely of gorgeously photographed celebrities screwing around. (Has Catherine Zeta-Jones, a notably beautiful woman, ever looked more beautiful than she does here?) Appropriately, it has a cult who might call it the best of the trilogy. Where I can sympathize with its haters, though, is when it frequently feels more like Ocean’s 6 or 7 rather than the robust, well-integrated ensemble of the first film. Ultimately, this is Soderbergh’s Mars Attacks!: An all-star goof-off whose initially bad reputation was both undeserved, because it’s frequently hilarious; and kinda understandable, because it’s pretty in love with itself even when it’s not bringing the actual jokes.
The one that wins the Oscar almost always winds up a bit of a bugaboo, doesn’t it? At the time, Traffic felt absolutely robbed of a Best Picture victory; based on the Oscars it did get, the Academy judged the movie the best-directed, best-written, best-edited of the year, with an award-worthy performance from Benicio del Toro on top. Naturally, the big prize went to Gladiator instead. A quarter-century later, Traffic still looks superior to Gladiator, and Soderbergh certainly deserved to beat out his own work in Erin Brockovich (yes, he was double-nominated in the Best Director category, something that hasn’t happened since). But compared to some of his later efforts, Traffic has occasional turns toward the didactic and simplistic. Compared to how he uses a sprawling ensemble in Ocean’s 11 (pure delight), No Sudden Move (spiky, off-kilter), Contagion (clinical, unnerving), or Full Frontal (vaguely insane), Traffic kinda comes across like a…regular movie. I mean, way better than the hyperlink thrillers of the 2000s it would go on to inspire, and far too memorable to dismiss entirely, but nothing that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (or the un-nominated Almost Famous) shouldn’t have beaten soundly for the year 2000.
One of the best, weirdest turns in later-period Soderbergh is his propensity for taking long-neglected forms of thriller and modernizing them with unusual twists. Unsane, for example, has the broad outlines of a stalker thriller that could have come out in 1987 or 1993; in 2018, though, the mad stalker who comes after Sawyer (Claire Foy) doesn’t have to do quite so much gaslighting, because a supposed healthcare facility pitches in with that unbidden, looking to turn profits on insurance fraud. That’s how Sawyer wounds up committed against her will – and trapped, with a killer! Soderbergh might seem too intellectual to indulge the genre’s seamier side, yet there’s plenty of unsettling violence alongside Foy’s (seemingly half-forgotten) tour de force performance, making this one of his most genre-y efforts.
The centrist Ocean’s sequel, the one that offers some degree of contrition for the indulgences of Ocean’s 12 (instead of two Julia Robertses, there are zero; instead of all over Europe, it’s back to Vegas) while, on the other hand, using some of those staid touches to smuggle in some of the goofiest shit in the whole trilogy (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan spending most of the movie in Mexico kick-starting a labor dispute with a factory owner; “The nose plays!”). It’s admittedly a bit weird that the one time Soderbergh has tapped into the energy of the Pacino/De Niro/Hackman/Duvall axis of ‘70s greatness is Pacino’s vaguely forgettable bad-guy role here, and admittedly a bummer that 13 is even more guy-centric than the other two despite the extra bodies. It’s also evidence that they could have made Ocean’s sequels every three years for the past 20 and they’d probably be delightful, or at least have a better batting average than Jurassic Park.
Presence represents a high-water mark for the 20-year tradition of opening a horror movie, usually ghost-tinged, in January; it has been ever thus since White Noise (the Michael Keaton movie, not the Noah Baumbach Don DeLillo adaptation) in 2005. However: Presence is much better than White Noise. Presence is also better than several of this year’s Best Picture nominees. Soderbergh’s movie inverts the Paranormal Activity formula—the camera represents some unseen spirit’s point of view at all times, resulting in a floatier form of home surveillance—and crosses it with a 1940s-style proto-horror thriller while folding in popular contemporary elements (grief, trauma, all that stuff). A family moves into a new home, and teenage daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) becomes convinced that it’s haunted; her distracted parents and brother have problems of their own. Much of the film is more eerie than flat-out terrifying; it’s also so thoroughly and vividly rendered that its ghostliness feels real even without the home-DV cameras, all the better to deliver its final emotional jolt. January is lucky to have it.
You know how, in the wake of hits like Book Club, studios big and small have scrounged together whatever three-to-four-lady combos of name actresses they can, preferably but not necessarily involving Diane Keaton? Soderbergh basically made one of those—with one of the stars of Book Club, no less, about a successful and egotistical author (Meryl Streep) reuniting with old friends (Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen) on a cruise from the U.S. to England. Rather than trading in nostalgia and pat life lessons, their friendships are genuinely thorny, funny, and rich in ways not typically afforded actresses of a certain age; this is one of the best later-period Streep performances, and Soderbergh finds plenty for Gemma Chan and Lucas Hedges to do, too.
One of Soderbergh’s most blatant “capitalism, you guys” post-retirement genre moves, this fish-eyed ‘50s-set Detroit noir has a pleasurably time-warped sensibility; its central duo of Don Cheadle and Benicio del Toro makes it feel like it could have been an early-2000s Traffic-era project, probably at twice the budget, while its quar-era scrappiness lends it a kind of eerie urgency that would be more fully capitalized in his very next movie (and also makes the movie at hand feel even more like a mid-to-low budget programmer from the era where it takes place). In the meantime, this one’s got punch aplenty, from a glowering Brendan Fraser to a perfectly smarmy Matt Damon cameo, and wittily knotty caper mechanics from screenwriter Ed Solomon. It’s not a movie anyone seems to talk about much these days, which really drives home Soderbergh’s uncanny ability to just make these things, knocking out any given year’s best crime picture like it’s nothing.
Maybe hold off on the rewatch of this one, no matter how high it rates among Soderbergh’s work, of which it may be his best non-comedic ensemble; you’ll get COVID flashbacks worse than if you just watched one of his movies that was shot or takes place during peak COVID, and you might even wind up jealous at the sight of Americans actively eager for vaccine uptake, which ultimately does wipe out the (fictional) virus this movie clinically follows on its global odyssey. Deadlier than COVID but also less lingering, the disease hops from animal to human (repped by Gwyneth Paltrow) to humanity at large (repped by, well, everyone, but including Kate Winslet, Matt Damon in everyman mode, Jude Law in sleazeball mode, Marion Cotillard, and more!) with disturbing efficiency and speed; moreso than Hollywood’s multiple disaster-movie specialists, it’s Soderbergh best-suited to depict the sheerly ruthless, unnerving quickness of the virus.
With this much-shorter redo of material previously covered by Andrei Tarkovsky in his acclaimed 1972 film, Soderbergh brought George Clooney to space for the first time—and was rewarded with an “F” from audiences surveyed by CinemaScore. (Gravity brought him back and left him there.) That bad grade should be a badge of honor; Clooney has rarely been so unaffected or vulnerable as he is playing Dr. Chris Kelvin, a psychologist who visits a space station to aid its crew only to find himself haunted by a sort of memory-resurrected version of his dead wife. Flashbacks show the genuine article, back on Earth, as the movie raises questions about how “real” our memories can or should be. The small cast also includes a terrific Viola Davis and never-better Jeremy Davies, but it’s Clooney’s show; his expressive eyes have rarely looked so haunted. Sometimes I wonder why Clooney and Soderbergh haven’t reunited in years, but then again, how many more of his best performances can the man give in Soderbergh’s films? (Two more await on this list.)
Though, as mentioned, his filmmaking has come to appear monomaniacally controlled—with Steven Soderbergh serving as his own editor and cinematographer under pseudonyms (hello, Mary Ann Bernard and Peter Andrews!)—what gives his work so much additional life is his wide-ranging appreciation of actors. He loves, and lovingly augments, the images of movie stars like George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, and Channing Tatum; he loves hyperspecific character actors like Nicky Katt, Luis Guzmán, and Jennifer Ehle; he loves to cast comedians like Demitri Martin, Patton Oswalt, Will Forte, and even the goddamn Smothers Brothers in serious parts; and he loves performers who maybe aren’t “actors” in the traditional sense. That last description could be applied to Sasha Grey, the adult film performer who plays an escort providing the titular service in Soderbergh’s drama, shot quickly and cheaply in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. The first of several Soderbergh movies that pay close attention to the entwinement of bodily commodification and the economic hell of capitalism, The Girlfriend Experience is short, a little bit opaque, and utterly transfixing, and Grey’s flat-affect performance is key to its success—empathetic yet a little unknowable, part of a traceable cinematic lineage that touches the recently acclaimed Anora.
With the second part of his 2009 one-two punch, released less than four months after The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh went in the opposite direction, lead-actor-wise, tweaking Matt Damon from a boyishly righteous movie star to a doofus-y whistleblower who’s even less of a “Grisham novel” hero than he initially appears. It’s one of Damon’s best, most go-for-broke performances, and his co-star is another one of Soderbergh’s most frequent players: sickly yellow interiors! It’s a lighting scheme he’s returned to in different contexts since going digital and assuming cinematography duties on his films, and The Informant! may have more of it than any of his other movies—an achievement unto itself that also points to the way he can find an eerie beauty in the less glamorous environments that often surround his characters outside the Ocean’s films.
It's an outlier even by his eclectic standards, but Soderbergh's sophomore feature—released way back in 1993, set even further back in the midst of the Great Depression—is secretly one of his best. This adaptation of A.E. Hotchner’s memoir follows the episodic adventures of Aaron (Jesse Bradford, later the adorably slack-jawed love interest from Bring It On), a 12-year-old boy whose family lives on the perpetual brink of dissolution and destitution, and in doing so becomes an early Soderbergh crack at analyzing—in an offhand, character-based way—the sometimes-devastating economics of life on America's margins. King of the Hill is neither a bootstraps-tugging fantasy nor an extended miserabilist wallow; it has the richness and variety of life, and a bittersweet tone to match.
I don’t particularly associate Steven Soderbergh movies with killer needle-drops in the manner of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and other seeming pop-music obsessives. (Doesn’t Soderbergh kinda come across like one of those guys who mostly listens to film scores? His annual lists of the many, many movies, TV shows, books and plays that make up his yearly media intake only occasionally include albums!) So it’s particularly satisfying the way a couple of great ‘90s cuts are programmed into Kimi, a fat-free yet character-driven thriller that Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp cooked up (and set) during peak COVID. That lingering threat, along with an assault in her past, keeps Angela (Zoë Kravitz), a work-from-home tech-industry agoraphobe, ensconced in her apartment, but she’s forced out into the pandemic-era world when she realizes she may have evidence of an attack on the smart-speaker datastream she monitors. In other words, it’s The Conversation meets Rear Window with a minimalist kick and a very 2020s outlook on the simultaneous connectivity, irreversible fact, and looming corporate threat of the technology that surrounds us.
Bodily commodification and economic recession collide again—though Channing Tatum makes the sweat look a little more fun, however temporarily, as a skilled exotic dancer who nonetheless dreams of making it as a furniture designer. Like almost everyone else in his industry, he’s just doing this temporarily until he makes enough money to move on; like everyone else in his industry, that goal seems perpetually just out of reach. (The nominal newbie-point-of-view character is the kid played by Alex Pettyfer, but Tatum’s star turn takes over pretty easily.) Some cinephiles vastly prefer Magic Mike XXL (which Soderbergh shot and edited, but did not direct) for its celebration of female pleasure and its willingness to provide what some audiences were expecting from the first film; due respect to those aims, but Soderbergh got it right the first time. Without denying the joy of his dance numbers, he locates the desperation and anxiety beneath them that ultimately charges a price for all that exuberant catharsis.
Fun fact: The original Ocean’s, while a fun all-star New Year’s Eve romp, isn’t really much of a movie. The remake, on the other hand, is one of those studio-movie miracles that seems plenty entertaining and fun while you’re watching it at the mall multiplex, doesn’t get any year-end awards attention because obviously it’s just an enjoyable romp, and then, when you revisit it a few years later, seems about as well-crafted and finely-tuned as this kind of movie gets—and doesn’t that kind of make it a classic? It does, and—no hyperbole, I don’t think—Soderbegh’s take on Ocean’s 11 is a big part of why George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon will be remembered as larger-than-life movie stars, rather than just good-looking actors who sometimes appeared in hit movies. The reflective, nostalgic glow of Las Vegas shimmers all over this caper, and though it spawned two very good sequels, the final image of Danny Ocean's crew (played by a poignant mix of then-current movie stars who'd never be this young again, stars of yore, and character actors who’d never carry a big movie on their own) departing the Bellagio fountain one by one manages the neat trick of bidding farewell to this brand of lighter-than-a-playing-card entertainment even as it’s happening in front of us.
Recent reports have David Leitch in talks to direct Ocean’s 14 with much of the original cast returning, and as painful as it may be to watch an Ocean’s heist not orchestrated by its true behind-the-scenes ringleader (see Ocean’s 8 for a pleasant yet also kinda dire example of this), it’s easy to see why Soderbergh wouldn’t be interested. Not only does he tend to look forward to his next experiment, he already riffed on the Ocean’s formula in this project, a low-gloss “Ocean’s 7-11” (a joke straight from the actual movie) written by his wife Jules Asner under a pseudonym, about two perpetually down-on-their-luck brothers (Channing Tatum and Adam Driver) who decide to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Though the heist itself is full of low-tech gumption, it shouldn’t be any surprise that Soderbergh pulls it together with smooth professionalism, or even that it’s one of his funniest movies, with a juicy supporting part for Daniel Craig as the safecracker Joe Bang. There is, however, an extra boost from Logan Lucky turning out to be one of the director’s warmest movies, trading Ocean’s archness for a familial glow.
Wilson (Terence Stamp), as clenched and punchy as a fist, flies to Los Angeles to investigate the death of his daughter, wreak revenge, and stew in his regrets over his shortcomings as a father. This isn’t Soderbergh’s last scrambled-chronology movie, but it does feel like the one where he gets the absolute most out of the technique, using it with the flicker-quickness of memory across a slim, sharp 89-minute neo-noir. Despite the inherent grimness and the tight storytelling, The Limey still makes time for some great comic bits courtesy of Luis Guzmán and Nicky Katt. It almost feels like it could be some previous-era filmmaker’s one final masterwork; for Soderbergh, it was simply his last movie of his first decade (and his contribution to the great movie year of 1999).
Speaking of The Limey: Screenwriter Lem Dobbs teamed back up with Soderbergh for another ultra-concise, slightly time-scrambled thriller about a virtually unstoppable individual kicking the absolute shit out of people. Yet Haywire isn’t quite a distaff version of the earlier film – or if it is, it’s equally informed by The Girlfriend Experience (in which Soderbergh builds a vehicle around a performer from another industry) and Magic Mike (in which the wonders of the human body are nonetheless subject to the whims of capitalism), all within the confines of an action-movie plot that could have easily starred Jason Statham. Importantly, though, Soderbergh and Dobbs built the movie around Gina Carano, then known as an MMA star, and the powerful grace of her physicality, which she shows off by plowing through some of film’s handsomest men, including Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor, as well as the obligatory parade of hired goons. It’s an action programmer with a kind of minimalist purity, or at least the closest you can get to minimalism with an absolute cavalcade of multiple eras’ stars on hand – all weirdly, wonderfully secondary to the betrayed contractor fighting her way through it all. As for the now-controversial star: On her own, Carano is apparently a bit of a bigoted idiot. In a Soderbergh movie, with his camera fixed on her face as she sprints down a city street, her determination contains multitudes. That’s the miracle of cinema.
Not a surprising choice, granted, but perhaps an inevitable one. At a do-or-die inflection point in his career, Soderbergh applied some of his more playfully experimental instincts to a straight-down-the-middle adult-oriented piece of entertainment, adapted from the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name, wherein a tough U.S. marshal (Jennifer Lopez) falls for a slick, nonviolent, but stubborn bank robber (George Clooney). In fell swoop, Soderbergh (1.) kicked off a six-movie collaboration with Clooney that would save and then bolster his leading-man status; (2.) directed Lopez to the best performance she’s ever given; (3.) brought key multiple-movie players like Don Cheadle, Viola Davis, and Luis Guzmán into the fold; (4.) made the more-or-less definitive representation of Leonard’s work on the big screen, despite working in the same era as the also-terrific Jackie Brown and Get Shorty; (5.) made a crime movie, romance, and comedy all at once, and (6.) had them all turn out just about perfect. Once you make a movie this good, you can either spend your entire career trying to replicate its success, or accept the imperfections of continual experiments. As ever, Soderbergh made the right choice.
