Steven Soderbergh Critical Essay | Critical Review by Nick James

Critical Review by Nick James

SOURCE: James, Nick. Review of The Underneath, by Steven Soderbergh. Sight and Sound 6, no. 3 (March 1996): 54–55.

In the following review, James discusses Soderbergh's directing style, its impact on the performances of the cast, and the overall feeling of The Underneath.

There is a chill about the films of Steven Soderbergh that's hard to dispel. Like Atom Egoyan, he likes to needle his characters for their ordinariness, to tease the strangeness out of banal circumstances with unnerving pauses and edgy music. This approach was perfectly in keeping with the subject matter of his breakthrough film sex, lies, and videotape with its pathological look at post-Aids suppressed-erotic love. It was less apt to his 30s period piece King of the Hill, adulterating the child protagonist's wide-eyed, trusting point-of-view with anomie. With The Underneath, however—the second film version of the Daniel Fuchs novel Criss Cross, first filmed as a classic...
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