Before he aggressively undulates, gyrates, and throws himself all around the stage of the Xquisite Strip Club, the Mike ofMagic Mikeflexes his proverbial muscles elsewhere. When he first meetsAlex Pettyfer’s Adam, he’s working on a crew under a roofing contractor in the Tampa suburbs, installing mission-style clay roof tiles with gloves and a mallet. Rather than justifiably focusing onChanning Tatumdoing physical labor and sweating in the hot summer sun, the script diverts its attentions toward Mike demanding agreed upon pay and hours from his boss. That boss later busts Adam for taking more drinks and snacks than is allowed. At the heart of everything inMagic Mikeis a negotiation of labor.
In almost every measure,Steven Soderberghis an economical artist. That’s clear in the narrative turns ofMagic Mike, one of his very best movies, andLogan Lucky, his imminent return from a self-imposed, half-serious retirement, wherein Tatum plays an unemployed laborer turned reluctant grand-scale thief. It’s also true of his aesthetic style and the staccato rhythm of his editing: he never wastes a shot nor does he allow the plotting to overgrow gestural notes of character or telling deliveries. For all the technical mastery that Soderbergh often showcases, his performers exude a rare freeness, an easy melding of persona with written character that brings about an unforced naturalness and resonance. The wayJulia Robertsspeaks, the way her face dims and brightens with dread and excitement, and the moments when she doesn’t speak at all says as much about who Erin Brockovich is as her work on the case against Pacific Gas and Electric of California in the early 1990s does.
One does not have to stride far to see allusions to Soderbergh’s perspective on his own chosen career in both his work with his actors and the way he often depicts the natural division of labor. There is only one major conflict inContagionandTraffic– a lethal global pandemic and America’s unwinnable drug war, respectively – and the films come at them from a stratosphere of different political and economic perspectives.Michael Douglas’ judge might wield the most power in the fight to shape better domestic drug policy but losing the PR war decimates his influence, whereas the dirty, legally dubious bargains and the testimony thatBenicio del Toro’s good cop can facilitate might do more for the real work of cutting down the cartels. And inContagion, the familial love and protective nature felt byLaurence Fishburne’s CDC honcho shows an exploitable weakness for bloggers, vloggers, hot-take journalists, and the angry masses, while the real good work is done by a quiet scientist with lots of guts and not much of a social life, played by the luminousJennifer Ehle. Just imagine if Fishburne was playing a director and Ehle was his cinematographer or set designer, and the value of the work remains, even if its urgency is moot in the face of a killer disease. And yet the jargon is always right, the pace is always steady and regularly electrifying, and the details of character, setting, expertise, and institutions are always plentiful without coming off as overly didactic.
WithLogan Lucky, the division of labor is just as important betweenRiley Keough’s ace driver,Daniel Craig’s bombastic explosives expert, and Tatum’s fearless leader. The director’s instincts are as sharp as ever, which isn’t entirely surprising when you consider Soderbergh has been spending much of his retirement working on Cinemax’s groundbreakingThe Knick, one of the best television programs of this or any other decade.
His natural habitat, however, is film, and in honor ofhis versatile career, I decided to rank all of Soderbergh’s films. (Mind you, hadBehind the Candelabra, his magnificent Liberace biopic, received a theatrical release, it would have placed high here.) Even the most problematic of them offer learnable lessons about the business of making movies, putting him in a rarified class of American filmmakers: ones who make movies that are consistently both imminently entertaining and unexpectedly audacious.
27. ‘Full Frontal’
Full Frontalis not very memorable, and that’s not something you can often say about a Soderbergh joint. Made at the time when plenty of remarkable directors were making extremely ugly movies on digital, this 2002 whatsit feels like a jumble of ideas spread out across a series of disjointed exchanges between a gang of talented actors, includingJulia Roberts,Blair Underwood,David Duchovny, andDavid Hyde Pierce. Like much of the director’s work, the question of how much a performer gives of them, and how much they simply create, is plumbed but not much else happens. Seen exclusively as a response to the advances of digital filmmaking and its promise of clarity above all, there’s a certain level of angst in what Soderbergh loosely orchestrates here but it never comes together.
26. ‘Ocean’s Twelve’
A titanic bore. If this sequel to Soderbergh’sOcean’s Elevenis worth anything, its in the cast that the director assembles and his own cinematography under the moniker Peter Andrews, which together tests the limitations of polishing turds. The script byGreg NolfisendsGeorge Clooney’s Danny Ocean and his merry gang of grifters over to Europe to recoup the money they stole from Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), while fending off maturity and expert jewel thief Tolour (Vincent Cassel). The pacing is brisk and enveloping but much likeFull Frontal, the whole movie feels like a loose stringing together of sketches about Ocean’s team, only about a third of which are worth anything. Extra demerit for includingBruce Willisin a meta role.
25. ‘The Good German’
War journalist Jake Geismer (George Clooney) is covering the Potsdam Conference in Berlin when he gets ensnared in the murder of his driver, the belligerent Tully (Tobey Maguire), who had a secretive connection to Geismer’s mistress, Lena (Cate Blanchett).Paul Attanasio, a long way from his script forRobert Redford’s majesticQuiz Show, goes for intricacy but hits convoluted instead, adding revelations and subplots that drag down Soderbergh’s lean production. Just as problematic is the conceit of Soderbergh attempting to replicate the look of famedHoward HawksandJules Dassinnoirs, only with his own experiments in framing and blocking to give a bit of personality. As an experiment, it’s amiable and well-acted but there’s no heart to it, no sense that Soderbergh or Attanasio saw anything of themselves in the material other than a fondness for an outdated style. It may be the only truly nostalgic movie Soderbergh has ever made, and here’s hoping he never falls back again.
24. ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’
The main thingOcean’s Thirteenhas overOcean’s Twelveis the additions to cast.Al Pacinois giddily over-the-top as Willy Bank, a real estate mogul who cuts Reuben (Elliott Gould) out of a lucrative deal and sends him to the hospital. In comes Danny and the cavalry to right this wrong, sending inMatt Damon’s Linus to seduce Bank’s right-hand woman (Ellen Barkin) while the rest of the gang tempt Bank into a scheme to take away the glory of his new hotel opening. The general tone is more overtly goofy here and that’s appreciated in comparison to the half-baked notions about criminal responsibility inOcean’sTwelve. Soderbergh still pushes his writers and performers to lean on invention over all, so things remain surprisingly fresh but there’s no substance here whatsoever.
23. ‘The Underneath’
An efficient, propulsive, and stylish little thriller that often gets buried amongst the taller peaks of Soderbergh’s 90s output. Unlike his tactics inThe Good German, the director envisions this remake of the noir classicCriss Crossentirely in his own style, even if it hadn’t developed much in the six years since sex, lies, and videotape. Still, he makes a handsome production out of this tale of a rehabilitated gambling addict (Peter Gallaghar) who goes straight but is sucked back into the world of crime via his ex-wife’s new beau (William Fichtner). Soderbergh stresses the struggles to maintain a job and a tame social life in the wake of addiction, which gives the film a splash of genuine curiosity and thoughtfulness, but more times than not, the filmmaker uses his time to hone his talents at building and diffusing tension. To be fair, he proves to be a veritable master at that very thing.
22. ‘Schizopolis’
It’s difficult to discuss just what exactly is going on here, but it involves the relationship between a self-help drone and a dentist, both played by Soderbergh in a surprisingly resonant and anxious pair of performances. There are flourishes of abstract symbolic imagery that suggest an ode to Godard but there’s something far more rueful about the overall tone of the movie. Watching it in the moment, there are stretches where Soderbergh’s plan seems to be “confuse them and then run,” but the overall feeling is that of refusal to play by the accepted dictates of narrative and frustration at its limitations, a feeling that fans of his should be used to.
21. ‘Bubble’
The most genuinely effective of Soderbergh’s early-to-mid-aughts experimental features. Re-teaming withColeman Hough, the writer behindFull Frontal, Soderbergh uses non-professional performers to bring to life this small and short tale of a murder in a small Midwestern town where a doll factory is one of the few viable employers left around. Its not an entirely memorable movie, aside fromDebbie Doebereiner’s stunning lead performance, but it’s a hotbed of technical and visual ideas that Soderbergh deploys in a fever. Though never boring, the entire thrust of the movie feels more dictated by the boundaries Soderbergh knowingly set for himself than anything else, making much of its action feel overtly staged and its vision of a world with less and less available physical and factory labor begins to feel more for show than anything else.
20. ‘Kafka’
Soderbergh has been working on a new director’s cut of this black-and-white surrealist thriller for over a year at least at this point. It’s the upcoming release I am most impatient to see, despite most of the director’s second film having been shot in 1989 and 1990. Back when it was released in the early 1990s, reactions were primarily indifferent toward this fantastical twist on the life of Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) around the time he was writing “The Metemorphosis,” borrowing freely from “The Trial” and “The Castle.” Arriving in the aftermath of sex, lies, and videotape, it must have come off as a stray foul ball but today, Soderbergh’s conflation of texts and fantastical biography is a consistently intriguing prospect.
This is also the movie where Soderbergh’s love forOrson Wellesis most apparent. An early shot of a group of aristocrats stuffing their faces in the moments before a bomb decimates them is nearly identical to the tilted, furious close-ups inCitizen Kane,Chimes at Midnight, and Welles’ own audacious adaptation ofThe Trial. There are also hints of another famous tale of persecution: Dreyer’sThe Passion of Joan of Arc.
In the aftermath of that same bombing,Kafkabecomes the main suspect and loses his job underneath a demanding, traditionalist boss (Alec Guinness). The movie depicts Kafka in a moment of artistic and political transformation and locates the influence in the ideas and scenes that he wrote in his novels and stories of the era. It’s not as technically assured as sex, lies, and videotape or, for that matter,King of the Hill, Soderbergh’s next film, but even at an early age, Soderbergh revealed himself to be an antic, studied visual artist skeptical of repeating himself.
19. ‘Solaris’
From the outset, there may be no more alarming sentence in modern filmmaking than “I want to remake a Tarkovsky movie.” It’s just not done, and for whatever the Russian master’s legacy as one of the great titans of the cinema, his films were never a box office draw on stateside. So, Soderbergh’s intent on rethinkingSolaris, one of the bar-none most influential foreign films ever released, was a bit of a controversy before he even cast polished Hollywood starGeorge Clooneyas the space-bound psychologist on the mission to the mysterious Solaris, where memories, fears, and dreams become inseparable from reality.
Surprisingly, Soderbergh’s take is a thrilling specimen, even if it never touches the grandeur and philosophical heft of Tarkovsky’s original. For the director, the movie offers a chance to experiment with non-linear storytelling in a distinctly ghostly setting – a spaceship manned by Clooney’s Chris Kelvin,Viola Davis’ Gordon, andJeremy Davies’ Snow. Kelvin is haunted by memories of his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), but there’s also a sense that she never died or that she has yet to die, leading to frustration, violence, and chaos on his ship. For those who glommed ontoArrival’s clever narrative trickery, this might become your holy grail, though Soderbergh is smart enough not to tie things up quite as neatly asDenis Villeneuvedid. Indeed, in Soderbergh’s vision of loss and grief at the edge of the universe, nothing is fully resolved and it becomes hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead.
18. ‘King of the Hill’
An undervalued gem of the director’s 90s output that was resuscitated by its release on the Criterion label,King of the Hillnow feels like one of Soderbergh’s most simple and satisfying tales to date. Based onA.E. Hotchner’s memoir of growing up on his own in Depression-era Missouri, Soderbergh’s third film confronts imagination run wild, asJesse Bradford’s Aaron must survive without parenting or much of any supervision while still trying to make it through elementary school. In the aftermath ofKafka, Soderbergh must have realized that the overseers weren’t always going to have his back. (In fact, they were rarely going to have his back unless he made them money.) In hindsight, for all the great sense of visual and dialectical detail that the director showcases here,King of the Hillis ultimately about the importance of self-reliance and self-restraint, knowing that you’re on the level when everything else drops out.
