Ranking Every Steven Soderbergh Movie, From Black Bag to Ocean’s Eleven

The worst product of Soderbergh’s streaming era—as well as his entire career—is The Laundromat, his second and final (to date, at least) film for Netflix that boasts an all-star cast including Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, Gary Oldman, Sharon Stone, Jeffrey Wright, and Will Forte. Telling the true story of the Panama Papers and exploring issues like insurance fraud and financial malfeasance through a satirical lens, Soderbergh and frequent co-writer Scott Z. Burns try to fit too much into this movie, which ends up feeling scattered, gimmicky, and flat-out awful.

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Spanning 8src minutes, Gray’s Anatomy consists of a monologue delivered by actor Spalding Gray about different people’s unsettling eye injuries, as well as his own experience of having eye issues. Even though it’s an interesting career movie by Soderbergh, who makes equally interesting and over-stylized visual choices to complement (or overpower) the narrative, the movie feels dated and fails to hold your attention.

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Following his Oscar win for Traffic and a string of highly-successful hits, Soderbergh took a big swing with Full Frontal that didn’t entirely succeed. This satire about Hollywood stars a slew of popular early 2srcsrcsrcs actors, including Julia Roberts, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener (always the scene-stealer), David Hyde Pierce, and Blair Underwood. A glorified experiment giving the director the space to try out whatever he wants in ways that fail more often than they don’t, Full Frontal is a misstep that you find yourself unable to take your eyes off of.

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Reuniting with Sex, Lies, and Videotape star Peter Gallagher for this attempt at a neo-noir, Soderbergh’s remake of the 1949 film Criss Cross is largely a failure in comparison to his other work. It follows a gambling addict who returns to his hometown and falls back in love with his ex-wife (Alison Elliott), who is involved with an abusive club owner (played by William Fichtner). While The Underneath certainly looks good, not much of the rest of the film is. Soderbergh himself recognizes the quality of the film, calling it “totally sleepy” and “dead on arrival.”

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With the blank check he earned from the Ocean’s movies, Soderbergh made a World War II drama that practically serves as a remake of Casablanca. It follows George Clooney’s Jake Geismer, an American journalist who goes to post-war Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference and uncovers a plan involving high-tech weapons, all the while reconnecting with his old flame (played by Cate Blanchett). Clooney and Blanchett have fantastic chemistry, but The Good German doesn’t bring anything particularly new to the noir genre.

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As a follow-up to Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh’s sophomore feature feels like the work of a completely different director. A biopic of Franz Kafka starring Jeremy Irons, it blends biographical details of his life with surreal imagery drawn from his stories to craft a bizarre and ambitious portrait of the Czech author. While it may not be Soderbergh’s finest hour and doesn’t feel very Kafkaesque despite how hard it tries to be, Kafka is still an impressive work; though it remains famously out-of-print.

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It’s truly tragic that the two collaborations between Soderbergh and Meryl Streep have been underwhelming, but Let Them All Talk has the privilege of being the better, more watchable of the two. This film centers on a famous author (Streep) who takes a luxury trans-Atlantic cruise to accept an award in England with her two college best friends (Diane Weist and Candice Bergen) and her nephew played by Lucas Hedges. Having mostly been improvised, this low-key movie is at its most charming when capturing the ensemble hanging out on the cruise ship, but the plot ends up dragging it down.

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Arriving at a time when Soderbergh was unhappy with the trajectory of his career post-Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis served as a radical reset that set him on the path toward what would end up being some of his greatest work. Here, he plays Fletcher Munson, a speechwriter for a Scientology-like religion called Eventualism, who is stuck in a loveless marriage with his wife (played by Soderbergh’s then-wife Betsy Brantley), who he discovers is having an affair with his dopplegänger, the dentist Jeffrey Korchek (also played by Soderbergh). Schizopolis is a strange yet brilliantly clever satire that shows off more of the director’s eccentric side.

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The rare Soderbergh outing that opted to use non-professional actors as opposed to his typical star-studded ensembles, Bubble is another experimental work that mostly pays off for Soderbergh. Returning to Soderbergh’s smaller-scale roots, it tells the story of a murder in a small Midwestern town that impacts three people who work at a doll factory. The performances are low-key and authentic, and Soderbergh chooses to shoot it in a grounded way that lends it the feeling of a documentary. Bubble is best known for being the first film released simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on DVD, and it’s a testament to his ability to consistently make interesting work that drastically differs from one another.

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Getting the gang back together to pull off one final elaborate, seemingly impossible heist to complete the trilogy, Ocean’s Thirteen is as much of a blast as its predecessors. Not every aspect of it works since it throws so many details about the heist itself our way all at once, but it features a glorious turn from Al Pacino, who has some of the movie’s best moments as a casino owner. A return to form, Ocean’s Thirteen feels much more similar to Eleven than Twelve was, but it’s also the weakest of the trio.

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No one does a crime thriller better than Soderbergh, and while his latest entry in the genre, No Sudden Move, doesn’t reach Ocean’s-level brilliance, it’s nevertheless an action-packed, twist-filled good time. Assembling a cast with the likes of Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Kieran Culkin, Brendan Fraser, Julia Fox, Amy Seimetz, and David Harbour, the 195srcs Detroit-set film is about a group of low-level gangsters who get pulled into a corporate conspiracy and must navigate the automobile industry that has been built to only benefit corporations. Beneath the slick and stylish surface, Soderbergh embeds themes like systemic racism, corporate greed, and capitalism in a way that doesn’t feel dismissive.

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Based on Scott Thorson’s memoir of his time as Liberace’s boyfriend, Behind the Candelabra is a rare instance in which Soderbergh tackles a straight-forward romance. This 2src13 HBO film starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his young lover, Thorson, is a sincere and affecting melodrama about the pair’s five-year-long relationship. Though it appears to be too conventional for Soderbergh at first glance, the unexpected standardness of Behind the Candelabra is what makes it stand out from the rest of his filmography, for better or worse.

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Marking the start of Soderbergh’s use of smartphones to shoot his films after Logan Lucky brought him out of retirement, Unsane—which was entirely filmed on an iPhone 7 Plus—is a claustrophobic psychological thriller exploring the timely subject of society’s inability to believe women’s trauma. It stars Claire Foy as Sawyer, a young woman who moves to a new city in hopes of escaping her stalker of two years and ends up being involuntarily committed to a mental institution after sharing with her therapist the belief that he has returned. With nods to Hitchcock and B-movies of the past, Unsane is a clever and brutally realistic snapshot of a system that fails to protect and help women.

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Before Gina Carano destroyed her own career, she starred in Haywire alongside the likes of Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, and Antonio Banderas. The former MMA fighter plays Mallory Kane, a badass former Marine working black ops for a government security contractor who ends up getting targeted for assassination. The brilliance of Haywire lies in the technical aspects, with brilliant choreography and sharp editing bringing a distinct flair to this otherwise generic, albeit entertaining, action flick.

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An adaptation of the 1972 memoir of the same name by A.E. Hotchner, King of the Hill is a coming-of-age tale set in Depression-era Missouri that centers on 12-year-old Aaron (Jesse Bradford) as he learns to live on his own in a hotel after his mother is hospitalized, his father gets a job as a traveling salesman, and his brother gets sent to live with relatives. Bathed in a nostalgic golden yellow hue and light in tone despite the heavy themes, King of the Hill is a tender and empathetic film seen through the eyes of a child. Soderbergh is a filmmaker who is always full of surprises, and here he manages to tell a fairly straight-forward story while still defying conventions.

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The sequel to Ocean’s Eleven has long been recognized as the worst movie of the trilogy, but it’s arguably much better than most give it credit for. Ocean’s Twelve is Soderbergh at his most playful and chaotic—who else would have Julia Roberts play a character pretending to be Julia Roberts? While it may not be as unabashedly fun as Eleven and fills itself with too many twists than it can take on, Ocean’s Twelve is just pure vibes from start to finish as Soderbergh lets his charming cast of movie stars run wild. They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

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Soderbergh’s terrifying study of how an airborne virus would erase a large portion of the human race gained a second life at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it began to ring more relatable than ever. As it tracks the spread of an unknown killer virus, the film jumps between several different narratives—there’s an epidemiologist (Kate Winslet) working to create a vaccine, an anti-government conspiracy theorist played by Jude Law, a father (Matt Damon) trying to protect his family from the outside world, and a physician (Laurence Fishburne) working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Contagion makes for an intense viewing experience, but Soderbergh never lets it feel too heightened and realistically captures the impacts this event has on civilization.

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At the time, Soderbergh had insisted that Side Effects would be his final movie, which may not have been the strongest conclusion to his directorial career, but is still nowhere near being on the same level as his misfires. It centers on a depressed wife (Rooney Mara) who sinks further into her depression after her husband (Channing Tatum) is released from prison. After a failed suicide attempt, a sketchy psychiatrist played by Jude Law prescribes her anti-depressants that have detrimental consequences on their lives. Side Effects goes down many unpredictable routes—some of which work, while others don’t—all the while offering an examination of the corrupt pharmaceutical industry. Only he could have made this twisted psychological thriller as riveting as it is.

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Remaking Russian auteur Andrei Tarokvsky’s 1973 movie Solaris, which is widely recognized as one of the most influential science-fiction films of all time, Soderbergh managed to escape from its shadow by crafting a hypnotic meditation on loss and the fear of letting go. It stars frequent collaborator George Clooney as Chris Kelvin, a clinical psychologist who travels to a space station orbiting the planet of Solaris and begins to be haunted by the ghost of his long-deceased wife. A highly ambitious and poetic exploration of grief, Solaris is Soderbergh’s most emotional movie to date despite being initially written off upon release.

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Continuing his experiment of using smartphones, Soderbergh shot High Flying Bird entirely with an iPhone 8, which makes it feel as though the viewer is immersed within its intense world. Penned by Moonlight writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, High Flying Bird follows an NBA agent (André Holland, who also starred in Soderbergh’s TV series The Knick) as he tries to negotiate a way into keeping his rookie client signed while the league is in a lockout. Through this sports backdrop and interviews with real-life NBA players like Karl-Anthony Towns and Reggie Jackson that punctuate the film, Soderbergh examines the ways in which the business takes advantage of its players. Regardless of whether you’re a basketball fan, High Flying Bird is guaranteed to hold your attention.

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