American auteur Steven Soderbergh is a remarkable man. More often than not, he acts as his own cinematographer and editor (under the pseudonyms Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard respectively) and is one of the few individuals to score an Oscar nomination for Best Director for two separate films in one year. He won it for drug trade drama Traffic in 2001, beating himself with the Julia Roberts-led legal activist biopic Erin Brockovich.
Playfully embracing a wide variety of styles and themes, Soderbergh is a nimble filmmaker who can dance from big-budget heist movies like Ocean’s Eleven with George Clooney to iPhone-shot thriller Unsane with Claire Foy to a Benicio Del Toro-led, two-part Che Guevara biopic.
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
Embracing enfant terrible energy from the off, Soderbergh made waves as the youngest solo director* to claim the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, with his startling feature debut, aged only 26. Recognised by the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” it casts Andie MacDowell and Peter Gallagher as Ann and John, an unhappily married couple whose beige-to-grey life lights up when his old college mate Gordon (James Spader) blows into Baton Rouge. Gordon has a thing for recording women speaking candidly about their lust for life, drawing in both Ann and her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), with whom John is having an affair, setting the scene for emotional bedlam.
[* Louis Malle was 24 when he won the Palme d’Or for The Silent World (Le Monde du Silence) in 1956, but was co-directing with the considerably more experienced Jacques Cousteau, then almost twice his age at 46, so Soderbergh really is in a class of his own.]
Sex, Lies and Videotape airs 10.35pm Saturday 5 April on SBS World Movies and will then be streaming at SBS On Demand for 30 days.
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Sex, Lies, and Videotape
drama • 1989
drama • 1989
Kimi
While Soderbergh’s films have always been taut, they’ve grown much tighter recently. Indeed, filming restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the impact of the Contagion director’s less-than-90-minute thriller, Kimi. Written by Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, set and shot during lockdown, it’s hung on a towering performance by Zoë Kravitz, who plays Angela, a shut-in IT guru who works for a tech company, Amygdala, that’s controversially monitoring users of its AI system, Kimi, to improve its performance. With her agoraphobia exacerbated by the pandemic, her lowkey panic, skulking around her claustrophobic apartment, only gets worse when she overhears a terrible crime that places her directly in the firing line in this compact but explosive firecracker.
Kimi is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Kimi
thriller • 2022
thriller • 2022
The Good German
In Soderbergh’s latest offering, the deliciously wicked dialogue-delivering Black Bag, Australian star Cate Blanchett appears alongside Michael Fassbender as married British spies stacked with secrets. There are also elements of international espionage in 2006's The Good German, her first rodeo with the American director. and set in a shattered Berlin in the aftermath of WWII, it casts Blanchett as Lena Brandt, a shades-of-grey character who we learn has made an awful bargain to evade the Holocaust. Fellow Soderbergh regular George Clooney plays an American war correspondent who gets mixed up in a muddle as competing forces tussle over concealed war crimes in this steamy noir that riffs off Casablanca and the golden era of Hollywood film production.
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The Good German
drama • 2006
drama • 2006
Behind the Candelabra
While much of Soderbergh’s oeuvre deals in more masc-coded tropes, there are elements of camp running through the back catalogue, amplified by the Channing Tatum-led strippers of Magic Mike. But this element met its apotheosis in the magic sparkle dust of Liberace’s glitter-sequinned suits, as sassily worn by Michael Douglas in the central role. Following the outré pianist in his fading years, Soderbergh focuses on the open secret of his concealed relationship with hunky animal trainer-turned-assistant Scott Thorson. As depicted by Matt Damon, the younger man becomes something of a Frankenstein’s Monster, as Liberace increasingly subjects him to plastic surgery to mould him in his image. It only gets odder from there in what is a spiky yet nevertheless bittersweet story.
Behind the Candelabra is streaming at SBS On Demand until 30 April.
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Behind the Candelabra
biography • docudrama • 2013
biography • docudrama • 2013
Haywire
Fassbender first popped up in the Soderverse as an unscrupulous MI6 agent in this action thriller centred on now-controversial former MMA fighter Gina Carano’s black ops agent, Mallory Kane. When she discovers that her clandestine employers want her gone at all costs, Kane embarks on a bare-knuckle and cocked gunfight for her life. Along with Fassbender, she must face off against a battalion of baddies, including her ex and now-former boss, Kenneth, played by Trainspotting star Ewan McGregor, with fellow first-time Soderbergh collaborators including Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas also in the mix in this fast and furious throwdown packed full of stunts.
Haywire is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Haywire
action • thriller • 2011
action • thriller • 2011
Let Them All Talk
The mighty Meryl Streep teamed up with Soderbergh in a quick one-two punch that opened with insurance fraud drama The Laundromat debuting in 2019, followed the very next year with this largely improvised comedy set on real-life ocean liner Queen Mary 2. Streep plays Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Hughes, who’s fighting through writer’s block to work on her latest manuscript while making the crossing from the US to the UK to accept an award on the recommendation of her agent, Karen (Gemma Chan), because her health does not allow her to fly. She has her nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges) by her side and, more awkwardly, estranged best friends Susan and Roberta (fellow titans Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen). As films set on boats at sea usually do, things soon get stormy, metaphorically speaking.
Let Them All Talk is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Let Them All Talk
Comedy drama • 2020
Comedy drama • 2020
The Girlfriend Experience
An intriguingly intimate drama that plays out in the run-up to Barack Obama’s stunning upset in the 2008 US presidential election, Soderbergh casts real-life adult film star Sasha Grey in her first mainstream role. She plays a high-end sex worker who specialises in offering her moneyed clients a relaxed service that feels more like a relationship than a transactional experience. Sparking a television series adaption sans Grey, The Girlfriend Experience has a listless, lived-in feel that embraces the director’s occasional tilts towards naturalism. Very much not a sex movie, it’s more interested in the ramifications of the encroaching global financial crisis, exposing just how hollow the American Dream can be.
The Girlfriend Experience is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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The Girlfriend Experience
drama • 2008
drama • 2008
Explore the , which also includes , the legal drama starring Geroge Clooney, on which Soderbergh served as a producer.
