Critics reviews

While its treatment of the drug war is unquestionably shallow, and its rhythms essentially televisual, Traffic crackles and growls and sparks in a way that precious few issue-oriented dramas can match. I'd happily watch a six-hour version.

The director is not afraid to use offbeat techniques to achieve what he wants and as such the documentary feel, different colour settings for each story, and the Spanish-heavy dialogue of Del Toro's story, create an air of immediacy and authenticity.

Traffic is an issues drama in the vein of The Insider, but with the ensemble cast and interlocking stories of Magnolia or a Robert Altman, but it falls a long way short of the dazzling euphoria those models so often evoke. Soderbergh is churning out slick, skilful entertainments, but it seems he’s working comfortably, easily, perhaps complacently, within his limitations.

Soderbergh's film uses a level-headed approach. It watches, it observes, it does not do much editorializing... The movie is powerful precisely because it doesn't preach.

Where Mr. Altman's masterpiece portrayed American culture as a jostling, twangy carnival of honky-tonk dreams, ''Traffic'' is a sprawling multicultural jazz symphony of clashing voices sounding variations of the same nagging discontent.

I don't get it. Maybe my bias against drug dealers, drug barons, and drug addicts as interesting characters is responsible, but I don't see this slightly better-than-average drug thriller, with slightly better-than-average direction by Steven Soderbergh, as anything more than a routine rubber-stamping of genre reflexes.

Traffic is a real cannonball, a hardass drama about the drug trade that Steven Soderbergh directs like a thriller — it comes out blazing.