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Entries in Steven Soderbergh (51)

Saturday
Mar312018

Brief Takes: Unsane and Pacific Rim Uprising

by Nathaniel R

Unsane (Steven Soderbergh)
Synopsis: A disturbed young woman, who is institutionalized against her will, is convinced that a former stalker is one of her nurses.

Capsule: The queer community got there first. Although to be fair when isn't that the case? Soderbergh's iPhone shot movie is no aesthetic relevation like the trans iPhone classic Tangerine. Still, more filmmakers ought to try to make something as fast and cheap and spirited as this thriller inbetween pricier or weightier projects...

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Friday
Feb022018

Claire Foy Goes Positively "Unsane" 

By Spencer Coile 

In just a few short years, Claire Foy has created an electric resume. After a lauded performance in Wolf Hall, she was cast as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown - leading to heaping amounts of accolades and acclaim. Now that her two season stint as the royal monarch is up, she is ready for exciting film projects. 

Unsane, the latest from Steven Soderbergh, feels different from many of his previous films. Shot "in secret" on an iPhone, it tells the story of Sawyer (Claire Foy), a woman who is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where she confronts her stalker face-to-face. Or does she? Is it all in her head? 

Watch the trippy trailer after the jump...

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Saturday
Aug192017

Review: "Logan Lucky"

by Chris Feil

Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic return begins with an apt statement that reflects the experience of his most entertaining films: Channing Tatum’s Jimmy Logan tinkers away at his truck as he tells his daughter Sadie a fantastical tale about the John Denver tune on the radio. When she asks what makes the song so special to him, his matter-of-fact response is that sometimes you just “like the song because of the song.” For all of Soderbergh’s conceptual refinement and polemical subtlety buried within his most mainstream features, sometime you can’t just help love the song.

Logan Lucky is another one of those films for the director, and another of his spectacular ensembles. Tatum is one of three protective Logan siblings along with Adam Driver’s amputee Clyde and Riley Keough’s no-bullshit hairdresser Mellie.  In order to stay a part of his daughter’s life after losing his construction job, Jimmy hatches a plan to rob a NASCAR motorway of its subterranean cash stash. For added muscle the Logans recruit the mischievous Bang brothers, led by current convict and hard-boiled egg enthusiast Joe, played by an inspired and loose Daniel Craig.

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Tuesday
May302017

YNMS: "Logan Lucky"

Chris here. Tucked away in late summer is Steven Soderbergh's Soderbergh's official return from cinematic retirement Logan Lucky. Why is this return so quiet with little fanfare? Well, probably because we always knew that retirement wasn't going to last long anyway - and maybe if Soderbergh is back, he'll stay low-key.

However, from the looks of the first trailer, Logan Lucky will be anything but a low-key romp. Soderbergh is back to the ensemble heist capers he turned into big hits with the Ocean's films, this time even more broadly idiosyncratic and silly. This film's heist seeks to pull one over on NASCAR, with the lovable thieves a set of goofy oddballs that sound more at home in the land of Coens than Soderbergh. Take a look at the first trailer, and we'll discuss the Yes No Maybe So after the jump...

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Thursday
Jul072016

Steven Soderbergh's Comeback

Steven Soderbergh is retired no more. The director, who had previously announced Side Effects (2013) as his last feature film, is making two movies in the next year or so. It was just announced that he will be directing a feature film about The Panama Papers, the leaked documents which revealed how many of the super-rich employ legal, but dodgy accounting systems to avoid taxation. Even some luminaries in the film world (Emma Watson, Pedro Almodovar and the estate of Stanley Kubrick) were named in that scandal. The film will be based on Secrecy World, a to-be-published book by the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Jake Bernstein. The adaptation will be written by frequent Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z Burns (Contagion, Side Effects, The Informant!).

Sounds like another Contagion, no? Taking a global incident and examining it from different points of view. Before that he will make Ocean’s Fourteen -- well not exactly, but Logan Lucky is a crime thriller with an all star cast set in one location. Sound familiar? This time there’s no Clooney or Pitt but we will get Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig, Adam Driver, Katherine Heigl, Hilary Swank, Riley Keough, Seth MacFarlane and Katherine Waterston and the NASCAR race in North Carolina as the heist location.

Soderbergh never really retired of course. He became prolific on TV, directing The Knick and gifting us with Behind the Candelabra. He recently produced The Girlfriend Experience which raised Riley Keough’s profile so it fits that she’ll be part of his new movie. And let's not forget that he was the cinematographer on Magic Mike XXL. But with these two projects announced he’s now a full time feature films director again. Are you excited for his return?