Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh) [26 points / 2 votes]
"Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh’s homage to the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock — billed as the auteur’s final theatrical film — is a good, old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment with thoughtful undercurrents. In fact, even labeling this an homage seems like a slight, as it’s truly an original and wholly new product. Soderbergh marries Hitchcockian techniques with the hyper-digital aesthetic of his late period to craft a film that’s about elemental fears in modern society. Killer birds and shower-stabbings scared us yesterday, so Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns must invoke a phobia more specific to contemporary Americans: the potentially dangerous consequences of an over-medicated populace.
Tackling such a hot-button issue through the unpretentious lens of a thriller allows Soderbergh to communicate thoughts on the zeitgeist just as effectively as a capital I-Important drama would, without any of the preaching. Side Effects isn’t anti-psychopharmacology, but it sees a need to confront the pervasive fear Americans still have about this type of drug, even though 1 in 10 of us takes them daily. Soderbergh realizes that the ideal way to do so is to fully engage the fear, to take it to its logical extreme in the form of a thriller. Yes, Side Effects goes off the rails for the sake of entertainment in its final third, but Soderbergh so masters both the social commentary and the B-thriller mechanics that he succeeds in having his cake and eating it too. This is the kind of smart, middle-budget movie for adults that the big studios should be making a lot more of." -- Danny Baldwin
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