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.

Film Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy has proven to be that rarest of things, a literary blockbuster in an age when book sales seem to be perpetually in an irreversible tailspin. Not only that, but they have succeeded despite incredibly dark and violent subject matter, particularly aimed against women, which seems like it might render the stories unpalatable to a mainstream audience. Yet the success of the books - no doubt driven in part by the mystique cultivated around Larsson's death from a heart attack at the age of 50 - speaks for itself, as does the staggering success of the trilogy of Swedish television films based on the books which were released worldwide in 2010, to considerable acclaim. (For the record, I thought they were pretty unspectacular, though I liked the books well enough.)