Opiniões dos críticos

In [what Bordwell calls Crazy Lady plots], the woman is the mystery. What is wrong with her? Why do her problems have such horrible consequences for her and others? Often the woman displays an abnormal division in her mind: the prospect of a split personality is never far off. The key factor is that her behavior is inconsistent.

In applying [Soderbergh] himself to the task of a story whose centre of gravity proves elusive, some of the same issues that cropped up in the restless ensemble approach of Contagion come to the fore again. The craft is impeccable, yet these carefully modulated frames never quite add up to a through-line of emotional empathy. A certain niggling distance remains...

Taking little glee in his film's ultimately tawdry transgressions and evincing none of Lang's grimly acidulous pleasure at the spectacle of avaricious human nature remorselessly exposed, Soderbergh in Side Effects is so angry that he not only loses sight of his target, but finally loses his grip on that pleasurable efficiency which had come to be his films' lowest common denominator.

The story has some conspicuously Hitchcockian elements... but it's no pastiche or neoclassical homage. Rather, Soderbergh shapes the film to respond to his own personal concerns, and, in doing so, gets to the very heart of why, in the midst of an exhilarating whirl of cinematic creation (such as "Haywire" and "Magic Mike"), he's stopping the carousel and getting off.

Terse yet anecdotal, "Side Effects" moves smartly along; it's maximally involving and skillfully atmospheric... For all its rug-yanks and transference of guilt, "Side Effects" is less a master class in audience-manipulation than a throwback to the sweaty, character-driven thrillers of the Michael Douglas era.

Written by Contagion and Informant screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, Side Effects was clearly conceived as a contemporary Hitchcockian thriller. But in the wake of Soderbergh's Contagion, The Girlfriend Experience, Magic Mike and parts of Haywire, it's also the latest in the director's ongoing series on the financial crisis—examining a world in which contentment is measured in money and mitigated through corporations and facades.

It'd be nice to report that he's going out on a high note, but for some reason he's chosen, for this penultimate at-bat, a script so head-smackingly stupid, so profoundly ignorant of actual human behavior in its quest for the "gotcha," that it would have made a passable B-story on an episode of The Practice 15 years ago.

Many of my complaints about "Side Effects" have to do with aspects of the plot I obviously shouldn't discuss in detail. For now, let's say that Burns' screenplay requires an increasingly ludicrous suspension of disbelief, and that what initially feels like a dark, hard-edged satire about psychiatry, finance, Big Pharma and the justice system eventually gives way to a thriller plot that's both hackneyed and implausible.

This scene between Zeta-Jones, perfect in her third film with Soderbergh, and Law, even better here than he was as the fear-mongering blogger in Contagion, reminds us what we'll really be missing if Soderbergh never makes another film: someone to diagnose our national malaise as coolly and seductively as he has.

The story's segue from intimate character study to wrong-man noir is wholly intentional and superficially gripping. But Law does little more than hit the same Parallax View paranoiac's note over and over, until things resolve themselves a little too neatly and miraculously. The emotional depths of the film's first half get bludgeoned by the simplistically lurid twists and turns, which hinge on some egregiously homophobic stereotypes that Soderbergh's clinical touch fails to complicate.

This film is one of Soderbergh's floatiest in terms of audience identification, and while that's a sure fit to the ethical free-fall explored by the story—not to mention the identity crisis of a drug that tautologically "makes it easier to be who you are" as Law's character puts it—the equivalent feeling of being untethered can also lead to not caring. Side effects may include whaaa...

Through his clever use of confined spaces and reflective surfaces, Soderbergh thrills in keying us to Emily's off-kilter state of mind, but Side Effects would be boring if it merely struck Contagion's alarmist stance and stuck to it. The film flirts with being a hysteric cautionary tale about Big Pharma's thuggishness only to reveal itself as a rebuke to the very cynicism about public health that Contagion so flagrantly peddles.