In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939) (first view) If anyone told me there was a 30s movie with Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, and Kay Francis, my first guess wouldn’t necessarily be a life-and-death melodrama, but here we are. Everyone is...
Near the end of Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk, Alice (Meryl Streep) comments on the fact that the trip she’s taken is not a “cruise” but a “crossing,” a one-way trip across the Atlantic from Brooklyn to Southampton. That’s...
As long as Sean Baker’s Tangerine exists, all Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane can hope for is to be the second best feature film shot entirely on an iPhone. Happily, that’s exactly what it is. Soderbergh gains points by baking the device’s...
Jimmy Logan, the protagonist of Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, lives in south-eastern West Virginia, close to his daughter and ex-wife. The action of the film begins when he’s fired from his job at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Somehow, the film doesn’t...
The upside to the winter television hiatus is that I have lots of free time to catch up on movie watching. The downside is that I end up watching movies faster than I can write these journals. Now that we’re...
Revisiting Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic after a number of years, one thing became almost immediately clear to me. It isn’t as good as I remembered. I suspect there are multiple reasons for this. Filmmaking (as well as film watching) sophistication has...
Steven Soderbergh has a well-known reputation for dividing his career into “one for them” and “one for me” categories. The implication, whether intended or not, is that his larger studio films (Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s 11, Contagion) are merely fulfilling a...
KING OF THE HILL (1993) King of the Hill is probably the least-discussed entry in Steven Soderbergh’s filmography. That doesn’t mean it’s a lesser work, though. Perhaps its diminished presence in the culture is due to its lack of a...
