If Ocean’s Eleven (2001) represents a straight line to the heist of three Las Vegas casinos, the sequel zig-zags, detours, and dances through a randomized laser grid to arrive at its destination. Ocea...

Ocean’s Thirteen is a low-key pleasure that rests on the charm of its leading men and the deceptively casual style of its director, Steven Soderbergh. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and the re...

The Good German is among Steven Soderbergh’s most daring experiments, though it’s not an altogether successful one. The artistic question driving the production is this: What would it look like if the...

With Erin Brockovich, Steven Soderbergh wields Julia Roberts’ star power to draw public attention to an environmental issue. It’s a shrewd tactic, but typical of the director using A-list actors to ex...

The Devil’s Advocate is a seductive, Faustian tale of temptation and vanity masquerading as a legal thriller. Keanu Reeves plays Kevin Lomax, a defense attorney from Gainesville, Florida, where, in th...

In the last few years, action films such as Max Max: Fury Road (2015) and the John Wick franchise have disposed of the previous decade’s interest in gritty realism. That grounded sensibility has been ...

When Steven Spielberg’s Hook opened in 1991, critic Richard Schickel declared it “essentially dead on arrival.” Spielberg’s update of J.M. Barrie’s classic fairy tale considered what happened to Peter...

Feasting on the limitless possibilities of storytelling and imagination, director Tarsem Singh Dhabdwar might be accused of visual gluttony for his efforts in The Fall. Richly composed of frame after ...

Scream 4 has the perfect opening to remark on a culture so saturated in meta-ness, irony, and social media that reality no longer has any meaning. In a familiar setup, two teens (Shenae Grimes, Lucy H...