The man simply loves to work, and though each piece of work does not lead seamlessly into the next—see his astonishing seven different same-year double features for his range of fascinatingly matched and mismatched pairings—they do all start to feel like components of a larger project. As such, selecting, say, the ten best Steven Soderbergh movies would feel particularly incomplete, even if it would constitute nearly a third of his fiction-feature filmography.
Alfred Hitchcock may be out of reach—though passing Hitch's total sound-film output may be doable. Trust the process. Steven Soderbergh broke through in a big way with the critically acclaimed arthouse hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape , released in By , after three follow-ups in a row failed to make much of a dent with critics or audiences, he was in dire need of a hard reset; his response, for some reason, was to write, direct, and star in!
Part sketch comedy, part parable, part satirical nightmare, Soderbergh shot Schizopolis in his hometown over a period of nine months—a surprisingly traditional gestation for the strangest child in his filmography. Befitting said filmography and its dedicated acolytes, there are hardcore Schizopolis -heads among us Soderbergheads. Maybe we should withhold judgment on this one until Soderbergh officially releases his long-in-the-works recut of his sophomore feature , whose original version was released to critical and audience bafflement and is currently available mostly in illegal online streams.
Kneff premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and garnered some appreciative notices. In any event, Soderbergh has generally resisted publicly tinkering with his old work, which makes Mr. Kneff seem worthy of anticipation.
As it turns out from its various immediate neighbors on this list, biopics, however unconventional, may not be his forte. The easy comparison is The Big Short , with offshore bank accounts and shell companies swapped in for subprime mortgages; The Laundromat is less flashy but arguably more disciplined as an attempt to translate that material into a workable narrative.
