Film Review: Side Effects (2013)

Steven's Soderbergh's retirement from filmmaking - something which, considering his commitment to directing an entire television series next year, should probably be viewed through huge sceptical quotation marks - has had two distinct yet symbiotic consequences. Creatively, it seems to have reinvigorated him, giving an urgency to his work that suggests that he is trying to work through as many genres and styles as he can before he leaves film behind forever (again: sceptical quotation marks). When you look at the disparate films he has made since he announced he was walking away - from the throwback action of Haywire to the lurid kineticism of Magic Mike - as well as the speed at which they have been produced and released, there is a definite sense of an artist trying to get everything out of his system before it's too late.

Hope Lies on Television #13 - Two Detectives, One Name

To commemorate, if that is the right word, the end of the second series of Sherlock, which airs on BBC1 tonight and on PBS from Januray 15, I wrote an article for Hope Lies comparing the two current iterations of the great detective: Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films. As a big fan of the series, someone who like the films and who burned through all the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories last year, this was immensely fun to write, especially since I felt that it worked within the framework of the columns - writing about the differences between television and film on a grander scale - very well.