The last four years have been the worst “retirement” for Steven Soderbergh, the idiosyncratic genius behind too many great films (and just as many weird, experimental films) to count. In those four years, after he announced his retirement from filmmaking on the heels of Side Effects, Soderbergh directed every episode of his turn-of-the-century hospital drama The Knick – arguably the best cable series to never get its full due – and the terrific HBO Liberace film Behind the Candelabra. He also produced a half dozen projects, one of which was Magic Mike XXL, which he served as cinematographer (under the common pseudonym Peter Andrews).
Point being, Steven Soderbergh never really retired, and we should all be happy that he’s “officially” backed off that sentiment with this weekend’s Logan Lucky. The notoriously rebellious filmmaker has built a decades-spanning career making whatever sort of film tickled his fancy at any given time, and some of them (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) were huge hits. But he’s never been keen on the typical hardline marketing techniques of Hollywood, which is why so many of his films come and go without much time to consider their greatness.
Of all the masters in the industry, Steven Soderbergh has the most substantial catalogue of underrated greatness. Here are the five I feel are sorely in need of a revival among the collective masses…
2The Informant!
Movies about whistleblowers can be captivating, dangerous, and emotionally draining. Movies about incompetent, lying whistleblowers are rare, and as is the case with The Informant!, they can be hilariously subversive and captivating in their own right.
Soderbergh has had a helluva time playing Matt Damon for a fool over the years, and there may be no bigger fool in the history of turncoats than Mark Whitacre, the vice president of an agro business who decides to turn over sensitive information on his company to the FBI. Except he has delusions of grandeur, and he’s a complete idiot whose story changes too often and too drastically for the Feds to use any of what he says. The Informant! is a genius upending of a subgenre, and like so many of Steven Soderbergh’s films it was dumped in a poor movie month (September in this case) and quickly brushed aside. A damn shame.
