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DVD (41)
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.
The promise of Sex, Lies, and Videotape has been fulfilled.
Director Steven Soderbergh is riding one of the hottest streaks in the movie world.
Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.
It leaves one feeling restless and dissatisfied.
A real cannonball, a hardass drama about the drug trade that Steven Soderbergh directs like a thriller -- it comes out blazing.
In terms of modern films, it kicked off a whole list of issue-related multi-character dramas like Syriana, Crash, and Babel -- and it may be the best of all of them, even if some of its stories are stronger than others.
A fascinating look at how we're winning and losing the "war" on drugs.
The primetime debut of one of Criterion's indies-in-residence, Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning drug war epic gets a terrific HD upgrade.
Flat and a little formulaic; mature teens and up.
"Traffic" leaps into growing gorges between profit and principle and, from a law perspective, questions the sanity of ramming heads into walls of cocaine bricks. It remains one of the Zeroes' preeminent epics even after policy cinema's shift to terrorism.
The whole movie, though very realistic and documentary style, seemed to be directed by an amateur.
Soderbergh uses a handheld camera to saturate the film, which he describes as Nashville meets The French Connection, with compelling, docudramatic urgency.
Le film de Steven Soderbergh et Stephen Gaghan est visiblement le fruit d'un travail de recherche exhaustif et d'une démarche narrative tout aussi réfléchie et cohérente.
Intelligent and highly thought-provoking.
Traffic is one of those square-up-the-middle tracts that make people think they're thinking.
Mr. Soderburgh never insults or spoon-feeds his audience. His camera only documents and observes what's out there. And with a subject like this, that can be the most effective technique.
By Hollywood standards, this is a decently written, well-made social problem picture, but it's not nearly as harsh, critical and effective as Traffik, the 5-hour British mini-series upon which Gaghan's script is based.
It's wise about different kinds of addiction and concepts of family, about the folly, futility and hypocrisy of anti-drug 'wars', and about the awful human cost of it all. And it grips like a vice from start to end.
Overrated... but worth seeing.
You may agree with its message, and be impressed by the camerawork. But this movie is stretched too thin and eventually asks us to accept some pretty ludicrous twists.
Like the film itself, this two-disc DVD set is technically brilliant and multi-layered
This close dissection of the arguably inneffectual drug war being fought by the US government is so complex, so intricate, that I am surprised that the film has met with commercial success.
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