1998 - OUT OF SIGHT entertaining sexy crime thriller

Cast a couple of very hot stars, put them in a crime thriller, hire a top screenwriter and get a stylish director to blend it all together and you have the very entertaining Out Of Sight.

George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez are on the opposite sides of the law, he's a bank robber and she's a Federal Marshal.  After getting arrested for a failed robbery Clooney breaks out of prison and ends up being pursued by Lopez. One thing leads to another and Clooney and Lopez end up getting locked in the trunk of a stolen car.  Sure enough sparks fly between this hot couple and after her escape from the car Lopez is on the trail of fugitive Clooney who is planning a big heist in Detroit.

Out Of Sight was adopted from an Elmore Leonard story and it has the usual twists and turns he brings to his crime novels.  Leonard's stories always seem to have a bunch of odd ball characters who are usually cops and crooks and this story is no different.

Soderbergh is a clever director and he excels at these kinds of crime films  He knows how to show off his stars and he gets some great chemistry going betweenClooney and Lopez, like they needed any help.

 

A lot of credit should also be given to the screenwriter Scott Frank who has always been a talented reliable guy particularly in the crime thriller genre.  it's actually entertaining to see a group of talented people come together and create a smart and fun thriller for a change.

The running time is 123 minutes

1999 - THE LIMEY, entertaining revenge thrilller from Soderbergh

The director Steven Soderbergh and the writer Lem Dobbs put together this entertaining crime thriller about a hardened criminal from England who travels to Los Angeles to get to the bottom of his daughter's death.  The plot has been done before but this film takes the basic premise and spins it with some clever story telling and a really great cast.

 

In almost a nod to Hollywood's past history Soderbergh put together an excellent group of performers starting with Terence Stamp (General Zod) is the transplant from England.  Character actor Luis Guzmán who is always fun to see, is the person who helps Stamp. Lesley Ann Warren usually associated with singing and dancing roles plays an acting teacher.  "Blues" himself from The Wild Ones, Peter Fonda is a mysterious record producer mixed up in Stamp's daughter's death. Barry Newman is Fonda's lawyer.  Newman was the star of the car chase cult film Vanishing Point.

 

Soderbergh brought an interesting visual and editing style with flash forwards and flash backs to tell the story it gives the film a nice contemporary feel.  Terence Stamp was a big deal in the new wave British cinema of the 1960's and he gives an excellent performance thirty years later.  In fact the whole cast is working at a high level throughout this film.

The Limey was produced on a modest budget but unfortunately didn't make money. To bad, this is a quality film which is also a very entertaining one.

The running time is 89 minutes.

2025 - BLACK BAG a spy film or a domestic drama?

From Steven Soderbergh a filmmaker who's always game to film something different comes this story of two married spies one of who is suspected of being a traitor.

Michael Fassbender is the agent tasked with figuring out who the traitor is.  Cate Blanchett is his wife who he is deeply in love with but might be supplying a malware to the Russians that would cause a meltdown at a nuclear power plant.  To get to the truth Fassbinder invites all of the chief suspects for a gourmet dinner and drugs their food with truth serum as he interrogates them in a highly amusing scene.

I always enjoy Soderbergh's films he has a total command of the tools of film making and knows how to use them, he's not a showoff of a director.  However this film would seem like one of his more minor efforts.  It's kind of an interesting film but even with the threat of nuclear meltdown this crisis seems like a minor problem at best. The focus is mostly on the uninteresting marriage of Blanchett and Fassbender.

 

You can't argue with the casting, Blanchett and Fassbender are good.  One time Jame Bond, Pierce Brosnan  amusingly shows up as their spy boss.  The rest of the cast, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris and Regé-Jean Page are all very talented if somewhat unknown British actors.

If you are a fan of Soderbergh's films you should enjoy this, but it's an extremely lightweight thriller/drama.

Written by the talented David Koepp, the running time is 94 minutes.

2017 - LOGAN LUCKY, an amusing heist film

The director Steven Soderergh must have a thing about making heist films, because he has sure done enough of them.  Oceans 11, Oceans 12, and Oceans 13 are the three that come to mind and Logan Lucky would be on a list with those films.  However Soderbergh manages to tweak the heist genre with  some amusing ideas.

The film is set in West Virginia as I recall and the plot involves two southern brothers played by of all actors, Adam Driver and Channing Tatum. The brothers conceive of a plan to rob a NASCAR racetrack during an actual race.  They recruit a convict called Joe Bang played by of all people British actor Daniel Craig to help them execute their plan.  Joe Bang has a couple of goof ball red neck brothers who also get involved in the heist as well. Also a quick shout out to Riley Keough (Elvis Presley's granddaughter) playing a hair dresser who appears to specialize in big hair styling at her beauty salon. The overriding joke in this film is that these supposedly stupid red necks are actually a lot smarter than they seem. 

Soderbergh is good at setting up the mechanics of the NASCAR heist and he has his cast play the whole thing in an amusing deadpan southern style.  Soderbergh is also a good director and a great story teller.  He never lets the camera get caught up in stylistic tricks at the expense of the film's story.  The film is very entertaining.

 

The film was written by Rebecca Blunt, the running time is 119 minutes.

2005 - BUBBLE, a fascinating film on small time life amongst other things

 Steven Soderbergh who always walks a line between personal films and mainstream film making sets his sights on the story of three people who work in a doll factory in a small town in West Virginia. We observe the interaction between a woman who takes care of her aged father, a young man who clearly has a social anxiety disorder and a single mother who comes to work at the doll factor.  To give away anymore would be a crime.

 Soderbergh's production team literally found three people from the local area where the film was shot and had them improvise their dialog based on an outline prepared by the screenwriter Coleman Hough. None of the cast was a professional actor.  The result is a fascinating film experience.  This film is about audacious as a film can get to put it mildly

Running time,  73 minutes

2011 - HAYWIRE, an attempt to update a 1960's spy film

Quirky director Steven Soderbergh and the writer Lem Dobbs seem to have a few ideas on their minds for this film.  They want to make an action star our of a mixed martial artist named Gina Carano, they are attempting to update the serious spy thriller which was usually competing with the James Bond series to a more contemporary time period and finally they are trying to make the action scenes in this film a little more realistic.

Since Carano had limited acting experience, Soderbergh put together a fairly high powered cast to support her.  Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum and Ewan McGregor are essentially supporting characters for Carano.

This is a modest but good action film.  The fight sequences are staged as realistically as possible and whatever Gina Carano lacks in acting ability she is certainly in very good shape physically when it comes to the running, jumping, fighting and shooting stuff.

As with all of Soderbergh's films this a technically well made and competent film that avoids a lot of overblown director's "touches."

93 minutes.

2006 - THE GOOD GERMAN, attempt at a Casablanca/The Third Man type of thriller with some dirty stuff thrown in.

The director Steven Soderbergh, has loaded up The Good German with lots of film making skill and style.  Soderbergh is a big admirer of Carol Reed's The Third Man.  He even repeats a few of the shots from that film.  However Soderbergh is stuck with a story that just isn't very interesting. 

George Clooney stands in for Humphrey Bogart or Joseph Cotton or Ronald Reagan.  Clooney wanders around post war Berlin looking for his lost love the too skinny Cate Blanchett.  Blanchett's the wife of some German Nazi rocket science guy who the Americans want to help them with their rocket program.

 The Good German is reminiscent of films like, The Quiller Memorandum, The Kremlin Letter, Funeral in Berlin and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.  One of those "dirty side of the spy game," films where the good guys aren't really any different from the bad guys and everyone is a corrupt bastard.  Besides having that in common all of these films usually had completely incomprehensible plots and The Good German stays true to this formula as well.

Soderbergh's a great director, with an independent streak.  He makes interesting films that certainly aren't the usual Hollywood pap.  Unfortunately he also makes interesting films that just don't have much of an appeal to the general public. 

The Good German is nothing if not downbeat, it's also not The Third Man.

105 minutes.