Steven Soderbergh, the busiest man in pictures

Steven Soderbergh was 26 when sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1989, and he has spent the rest of his career refusing to make the film anybody expected next. He shoots his own pictures, under the name Peter Andrews, and cuts them, as Mary Ann Bernard. He announced his retirement in 2013, was directing television within a year and was back in cinemas by 2017. He has made, depending on how you count, something over thirty features, and we have reviewed nearly all of them, which puts us in a position to say what nobody who has only seen the Ocean's films can: that he is the most interesting American director of his generation, and also the most uneven, and that these are the same fact.

The ones to start with

Out of Sight (1998) is, for our money, the best thing he has made. George Clooney is a bank robber, Jennifer Lopez is the federal marshal he ends up sharing a car boot with, and Elmore Leonard's novel gives them things to say to each other that people in films almost never get to say. It is sexy, funny, relaxed and beautifully cut, and it made Clooney a film star after several attempts had failed.

Traffic (2000) is the serious one: three storylines about the drug trade, each in its own colour, and it won him the Oscar for directing in the same year he was nominated for Erin Brockovich, which is the warm one, Julia Roberts taking on a utility company and winning her own Oscar for it. Watch them as a pair and you have the range.

Ocean's Eleven (2001) is the fun one, and there is nothing wrong with fun done this well. Clooney, Pitt, Damon and the rest rob three casinos in Las Vegas in a film that is entirely about how pleasant it is to watch handsome people be competent. Ocean's Twelve is the sequel in which they all went on holiday and invited the audience to pay for it; Ocean's Thirteen is the apology.

The ones that show what he can do

The Limey (1999). Terence Stamp as a Cockney ex-con in Los Angeles looking for whoever killed his daughter, cut like a memory, with Peter Fonda as the man he is looking for. Short, sharp and sad, and Stamp's best late performance.

King of the Hill (1993). A boy left alone in a St Louis hotel during the Depression. Almost nobody saw it. It is one of the best American films about childhood and we would put it against anything.

Behind the Candelabra (2013). Michael Douglas as Liberace, Matt Damon as the young man he took up, and a film that is tender, funny and clear-eyed about power. It was made for television because no studio would touch it, which tells you about studios.

Kimi (2022). Zoë Kravitz as an agoraphobic tech worker who hears something she shouldn't in a recording. Ninety minutes, a locked-down Seattle, a thriller with the fat trimmed off. This is what he does when he is enjoying himself.

Black Bag (2025). Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married spies, one of whom may be a traitor, and a dinner party that is the best scene of its year. His most elegant film in a decade.

The experiments

He has spent the gaps between the hits trying things, and the trying is the point even when the film isn't. Schizopolis (1996) is a comedy he made for nothing in which he plays two roles and nobody speaks in complete sentences; it is the film that got his nerve back. Bubble (2006) used real people from an Ohio doll factory and came out in cinemas and on television on the same day, a decade before anybody else tried it. Unsane (2018) was shot on an iPhone, and looks it, on purpose. Full Frontal (2002) is the one even his admirers struggle with. Solaris (2002), his remake of Tarkovsky with Clooney adrift in space and grief, was written off at the time and looks better every year.

The pictures about work

The thread through all of it is process: how things actually get done, by whom, and for how much. The Informant! (2009) is a whistleblower comedy with Matt Damon at his most peculiar. Magic Mike (2012) is a film about male strippers that is really about the gig economy, and it is far better than its title has ever let it be. High Flying Bird (2019) is about a basketball lockout and is essentially a heist picture in which the loot is the players' own labour. Logan Lucky (2017) is Ocean's for people who work with their hands. Contagion (2011) is a procedural about a pandemic, made nine years early, which everybody watched again in 2020 and found had got nearly everything right.

The one to save for later

Che (2008), two films and four and a half hours on Guevara, is a serious, patient, deliberately undramatic piece of work that rewards the effort and does not care whether you make it. It is the film that most clearly shows what he thinks the cinema is for. It is not the one to start with.

Start with Out of Sight. Then The Limey. Then, if you are still with him, you will not need us.

Features are written by AI in Fi1m’s voice, checked against our reviews before publication, and corrected in the open. How we use AI