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"Over the last three decades,&amp;nbsp;Steven Soderbergh&amp;nbsp;has been the most versatile, not to mention hyperactive, of Hollywood directors and, as befits the movie that he has said will be his swan song, \u201CSide Effects\u201D showcases much of what the just 50-year-old filmmaker does best.Soderbergh had often spoken of moving on. When I included him last year as one of&amp;nbsp;10 directors to watch&amp;nbsp;I kind of assumed that, given his range, he would ultimately stick with cinema. (There\u2019s one more movie in the can \u2014 a long-germinating&amp;nbsp;Liberace&amp;nbsp;biopic, \u201CBehind the Candelabra,\u201D with Michael Douglas&amp;nbsp;as the flamboyant pianist and&amp;nbsp;Matt Damon&amp;nbsp;as his lover, will be cablecast on HBO.) But, even retired, Soderbergh serves an example. His intellectual curiosity, technical facility, and ease in moving back and forth between performance documentaries, star-studded studio pictures, low-budget experiments, genre flicks, blatant Oscar-bait, and unclassifiable cinematic \u201Cfollies\u201D like the \u201CSolaris\u201D remake and his four-hour \u201CChe\u201D (two of his strongest efforts, in my opinion) makes him a model modern filmmaker. Without him, his only two peers,&amp;nbsp;Richard Linklater and&amp;nbsp;Gus Van Sant, will be more or less out there by themselves.\u201CSide Effects,\u201D which might be described as a psychiatric thriller (as \u201CContagion\u201D was a forensic one), is a skilled, sveltely directed piece of work co-starring&amp;nbsp;Rooney Mara, sans tattoo, as a young woman who commits an appalling crime while under the zombie influence of an experimental antidepressant drug, and&amp;nbsp;Jude Law&amp;nbsp;as her beleaguered, increasingly hysterical psychiatrist. Soderbergh semi-regular&amp;nbsp;Catherine Zeta-Jones&amp;nbsp;has a juicy supporting role as another shrink. The script, by&amp;nbsp;Scott Z. Burns&amp;nbsp;(who wrote \u201CContagion\u201D), is laden with moral ambiguities: Does legal culpability lie with the doctor or the patient? What about the pharmaceutical companies? Who is the victim and how much consciousness is required to establish intent? What is acting anyway? (The latter is a long-standing Soderbergh concern and \u201CSide Effects\u201D derives considerable tension from the \u201Cperforming\u201D performance delivered by its small, thin, intense leading lady.)Terse yet anecdotal, \u201CSide Effects\u201D moves smartly along; it\u2019s maximally involving and skillfully atmospheric. Shot as usual by the director himself (under the name Peter Andrews), the action shifts from one mega institution to another (prison, hospital, facility for the criminally insane). The system is all encompassing and Manhattan\u2019s chill solitude casts an additional pall. The city seems simultaneously grandiose and sedated. Still, there\u2019s a certain glibness. For all the cosmic perspective afforded by Soderbergh\u2019s soaring crane shots, the lift they provide is not sufficient to support the viewer\u2019s suspension of disbelief. The great&amp;nbsp;Hitchcock&amp;nbsp;has been evoked by many reviewers. Critics will certainly be sorry to see Soderbergh go, but I doubt their flattery will persuade him to stay.For all its rug-yanks and transference of guilt, \u201CSide Effects\u201D is less a master class in audience-manipulation than a throwback to the sweaty, character-driven thrillers of the Michael Douglas era. \u201CSide Effects\u201D has numerous points of contact with \u201CFatal Attraction\u201D and \u201CBasic Instinct.\u201D Like them, it\u2019s not particularly PC but unlike these much maligned, proudly florid crowd-pleasers, it lacks a certain unbridled nastiness. The palette is not the only thing that seems subdued in \u201CSide Effects.\u201D Perhaps this is the movie in which, preparing for a change, Soderbergh gave vent to his own depression.Read more J. Hoberman at Movie Journal.&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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