Is the work of Steven Soderbergh the most overrated thing ever?

You wouldn't be complaining if it had been Julia Roberts.

Julia Roberts...meh. Julia Louis-Drefyus in her birthday suit with a bowl of chicken soup and matzoh balls...now we're talking.

How so?

(i enjoyed it mainly bcz i discovered that my friend nic totally looks like julia roberts as she in in this movie, and i never noticed in real life: so basically for me it wz all abt how my friend nic worked her butt off in skanky too-tight clothes to win all these foax in a small US town lots of deserved money for being poisoned by THE MAN)

(probbly the best bit is, if i told nic she looks like JR in EB, she wd doubtless punch me in the mouth!!)

(the orig Traffik is great)

(and wasn't EB, well, a lie [ie company not found liable but settled and lawyers got all the money anyway or some such thing]?)

What Ilike about him is his workman like attitude to film-making.

haha in fargo it says "based on a true story" and ppl said "is it?" and they said "no" and ppl said "you can't do that!!" and they said "why not? it's fiction ie not true so that includes the phrase 'based on a true story'"

Pitch Black was great too. I hadn't noticed the connexion befor but that and Kafka have a lot in common. King Of The Hill is grebt.

I suspect Traffic will be unwatchable in a few decades. It's like Stanley Kramer + Alan Pakula.

He ain't no Terry Gilliam though.

Didn't have the heart to go see _Solaris_, myself.

Yes, the inhumanity of the characters is the entire point. Their lives and their jobs are entirely integrated - they’re perfect for each other because they’re identically soulless, and both fulfilled by the quotidian awfulness of the spy business. Abela’s performance and character are a wonderful, deliberate counterpoint to them, not an accidental relief.

(The stiffness of Fassbender and Blanchett is also aimed to let the audience wrongfoot and red-herring themselves several times, so that the genuineness of their personalities and their declarations of love can hit as a punchline once you realise it’s not spyfabe.)

fuzzy camera

it was just natural lighting, right?

Their lives and their jobs are entirely integrated - they’re perfect for each other because they’re identically soulless, and both fulfilled by the quotidian awfulness of the spy business. Abela’s performance and character are a wonderful, deliberate counterpoint to them, not an accidental relief.

otm. And Tom Burke has become my favorite cad in movies.

looking forward to this as a companion/counterpoint to the several episodes I watched of the Fassbender-starring show The Agency, before switching to OG version w/The Bureau (Kassovitz>>>Fassbender for the purposes of that specific role)

Yes, the inhumanity of the characters is the entire point. Their lives and their jobs are entirely integrated - they’re perfect for each other because they’re identically soulless

I was already looking forward to this but reading that Tom Burke is in it got my anticipation way up, cant wait to catch it this weekend

But the masks are the best things about people!

I found the masks uninteresting to behold or contemplate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fassbender's most interesting onscreen mask:
http://i.imgur.com/E3MTSDJ.jpeg

This was great, as was its score.

Really enjoyed this. I actually liked that none of the characters are very likable, no point in making you sympathize with these people. The fun is in watching story unwind. I agree with Tracer about Marisa Abela, we immediately googled her after the movie.

Also yeah the David Holmes score is great. Holmes/Soderbergh is low-key one of the great composer-director teams.

I felt a kind of yuppie nostalgia watching this, the idea of wearing nice clothes to work and having rare friendly dinners with IRL office co-workers and so on.

I’ve remembered maybe seven music cues total after seeing films, but in the theatre was delighted to think of how well the “this album is kind of a soundtrack to an imaginary film, actually” gambit worked out for him, especially compared to approximately everyone else that played it.

I really loved the experience of watching this.

is yuppie over?

liked this a lot

I loved this, but def didnt think Fassbender was playing an inscrutable sphinx, i actually thought it was kind of amusing how on-the-surface he was playing everything. every time we were shown him noticing someone or watching something, he had his eyes super-wide and looked like he was violently boring holes into whatever he was staring at. I lol'd at the scene in the cinema where he was noticing Blanchett reacting to the movie, and he had his head turned fully 90 degrees glaring at her 5 inches away from her face, eyes like dinner plates. not exactly the most subtle customer, as secret agents go.

absolutely adored Holmes' score, one of his best

Did anyone say they thought him inscrutable? I thought him totally overdetermined. Like, we get it Michael. An Anglepoise lamp in human form.

fair, yeah i guess from all the talk about soulless machinelike inhumanity and George Smiley references I was primed to expect a more enigmatic difficult-to-read thing from Fassbender. which, not complaining, I loved what he did.

I very much enjoyed the Orson Welles vibes that Burke was giving in those dinner scenes, then I looked it up and hadnt realized he played Welles in Mank. Might actually check that out now.

I have a crush on him.

really loved it

disagree with tracer on many aspects, i think the director and leads do enough to entice me into the high-end bbc london spy wealth style life so that i was happy to get through the rushed and functional and very theatrical agatha christie dinner party, and tbh the interplay between our two leads would have carried me through a lot worse.

score, sound, style, production values all great.

burke is great. apart from page and brosnan, who were as good as they can be, the others were all also great.

i thought fassbender was good, if you have quibbles over what the character is then its a sexy cypher in a sexy london thriller, george unsmiley, i thought more of his role in the killer than i did his cyborg

anyway, he and blanchett worked for me, and if you dont find it sexy then i cant argue that for you but i did. fred and ginger at the top of the service, she gave him sex, he gave her classified.

other strong points in favour-

i. once we have it resolved, it has one finish and it stays finished. no need for a tassle when we are having fun with just one thread

ii. linked to above, christ how joyously short it was, fabulously tailored and not carrying a pick of weight, (ed.- link this back to our two main characters before resubmitting), more of this less please.

anyway- plot, hokum, execution a+, Id watch ten sequels

otm

Yes, agreed.

Soderbergh is one of the few contemporary directors who does sex scenes well I think

Rolled my eyes a bit at the blatant Pret product placement but then thought ok, a film about life in London circa 2025, they can't very well not include a pret.

I watched Kimi last night after watching Presence and Black Bag in the last couple of months, and Soderbergh and Koepp really are a dream team for me. Terrifically sturdy crafted objects, like the best-built chairs I've ever sat in.

Kimi so good

pret a portend xps

Just learned that the voice of Kimi is his ex-wife, and also that his current wife wrote the screenplay for "Logan Lucky," under a pseudonym.

goddamn i loved Black Bag

like this will sound dumb but i want to send him an edible arrangement w a thank you card for getting in and out of a movie in 90 min and making it exciting, tense, well-paced, tasteful, funny and somehow quite familiar. Like it all felt tropey but just a few degrees off ti keep you guessing.
Chef’s kiss, no notes.
Thx Sodey

(also i loved how the dinner party table setting had SO many filament lights as to be hilariously distracting and yet still seeming very cool and understated?)

I love how just about every film this man releases is a middle finger to the thread title

sotherebird

Split decision here; my wife gave BLACK BAG 2.5 out of 5, while I liked it quite a bit, probably 4.5 out of 5.

Wait did I forget to post about it here when I caught in the theater? I'm with VG/unperson/dmac/everyone similarly inclined upthread, it's great.

Finally watched No Sudden Move from 2021 and thoroughly enjoyed it. I feel almost like Poor Things prepared me for the ultra-wide/distorting lenses in this one. So many characters and such a complicated plot, it's worth watching with focus (glad I had headphones on instead of just missing bits). Really satisfying.

breezed through Black Bag - very enjoyable and I’d rather watch a movie series for this before Knives Out.

sotherebird

underappreciated post

having rewatched The Knick a few weeks ago, I would strongly advocate for rewatching The Knick

I loved S1 but for some reason I never did S2 I don't think

breezed through Black Bag - very enjoyable and I’d rather watch a movie series for this before Knives Out.

― Western® with Bacon Flavor

One of the year's best.

Didn't realize he even put out a third movie this year, The Christophers, a two-character one-room one with Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel (TIFF review here).

Still awaiting distribution iirc

The Knick season 2 is great because our antihero played by Clive Owen discovers you do cocaine *and* heroin

Last episode of the series might be one of the best "well, that certainly happened and we should have seen it coming" moments in a tv show

breezed through Black Bag - very enjoyable and I’d rather watch a movie series for this before Knives Out.

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, 07 October 2025 13:58 (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

💯

underappreciated post

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), 07 October 2025 17:48 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was more into the fred and ginger line tbh

Greetings 765’rs!

I am thrilled to hustle 2025 out the back door so we can get to the good stuff in 2026, because all (astrological) signs point to this being a very positive year! To begin, we have Mr/Dr Soderbergh’s SEEN, READ list, and it’s a wild one, even by his standards. For one thing, he’s listed WRITING projects that he’s completed, which is a new wrinkle. He actually did a bit of writing in 2020 during lockdown but kept it to himself. Not this time. To him I suppose these read as accomplishments but all of us here know that if he’s writing, something is seriously UP. Since he won’t let us read anything beforehand I can’t speak to the quality of the work, but I can tell you that Production 02074 is the JAWS project he’s been working on for forever so I guess to be fair he should have some sense of accomplishment about that one. The rest? Who knows.

More importantly, the long-promised, limited edition boxed set of his prior independent films WILL be released this year, most likely by summer. I can say this unequivocally because he is LEGALLY BOUND to have it available in 2026, and I’ve actually gotten my eyes on this baby, so I know it’s ready to go. Don’t let the idea of me working myself to death to fulfill your order keep you from making the purchase when the time comes—it really is a treat for you die hard completionists out there.

That’s all for now. As always, we wish you and yours a happy and healthy new year.

All the best,

Fabrizia del Dongo

Criterion Channel has The Limey with the director/screenwriter commentary, the one where Soderbergh and Lem Dobbs butt heads over what works and doesn't in the movie. Loved that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2d1x7VuDmo

This manages to survive even a significant amount of James Corden screen time. McKellen is a treat.

Looking back at the Knives Out refs wrt Black Bag upthread and this one invites them even more...

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/steven-soderbergh-the-christophers-star-wars-ben-solo-movie-controversial-ai-comments-1236713201/

Steven, congratulations on getting into Cannes with your documentary “John Lennon: The Last Interview.” Your recent comments about using AI on the film have been heavily criticized. What do you make of the debate?

Soderbergh: (Pauses) This is mystifying to me.

Are you unaware of the blowback?

Soderbergh: No, I’m aware. I found out from people looking at me like they’d seen my chest X-ray. I was like, “What’s up?” And they’re like, “These AI comments!” And they read me back what I had said, and I honestly felt, “Where’s the smoke here?”

You used AI on that film and said you are going to use it on an upcoming film about the Spanish-American War. Clearly, you see it as a useful tool?

Soderbergh: I’m just not threatened by it. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do. It turned out to be a very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve a creative problem about how to visualize what John and Yoko are speaking about philosophically. Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it. I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, “That was a fun phase.” We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to. There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.

Ed, as a writer, what do you think of AI?

Solomon: I’m not interested in using it as a writing tool because it takes away from what I love about what I do, which is the process. It makes it result-oriented. I’m not scared of it. I just don’t see myself using it in any kind of a significant creative way.