Critics reviews

The significant [Soderbergh] division is between the films that are stuffed with physical action (like Haywire, 2011), and those that are all spoken words (like Full Frontal, 2002). I know which half of his filmography I prefer.

Soderbergh and McCraney create one of the finest sports films about the art of teaching.

The film mirrors its own making, and makes a better case for iPhone as a filmmaking tool than Unsane did. Phones make things happen—whether it’s viral videos and social media beefs that stir up public interest, or a scene shot mid-day on a Manhattan sidewalk with minimal prep.

The self-reflexive aspects are fun to tease out. It’s easy enough to see a link between Ray, a virtuoso negotiator whose experiences have left him with a weathered cynicism about his chosen field, and Soderbergh, who also knows a thing or two about being the Rookie of the Year. Back in 1989, he was the new wunderkind on the block after the watershed, game-changing release of Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

There’s hardly any gameplay in Steven Soderbergh’s new basketball film, High Flying Bird. That is, there’s hardly any basketball—but there are plenty of games, and the one-on-ones are delightfully brutal.

It uses the charisma of athletes and the competitive energy of the game they play to catalyze a feisty, twisty fable of labor and capital in the 21st century.

Though the physical scale of the action is narrower than what Soderbergh planned for “Moneyball”—his reported budget was a mere two million dollars—the new film is deliciously distinctive, surpassing anything that Soderbergh was making in the studios a decade or more ago.

Soderbergh annihilates platitude to acknowledge a disturbing truth: that progressive revolution demands an imagination so powerfully tactile that it eclipses the assuring physicality of even an awful reality.

Bricking on its verisimilitude about as frequently as LeBron James misses a free throw, High Flying Bird seems to compress the last decade or so of basketball history into its hour-and-a-half runtime.