Side Effects Reviews
Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Canada)
Even when it twists back to Hitchcockland, there's more than enough lingering spookiness about a culture's dependence on prescription drugs and psychiatry to wrench Side Effects away from being a mere trickster-tale.
Badass Digest
Soderbergh is that rare director who can turn a clunky screenplay into something almost entirely delicious, and with SIDE EFFECTS he does exactly that.
Movie Chambers
Soderbergh, with the help of some excellent writing by Scott Z. Burns and an outstanding cast, take you to Hitchcock territory.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Film4
A masterful double-bluff. What starts as a taut, topical drama about medicated America becomes a classic, twisted neo-noir that sees Soderbergh pushing aside on-the-nose themes in favour of sheer entertainment.
Movie Talk
One moment, we're watching an enthralling exposé of the modern pharmaceutical industry; the next we're reeling from some well-timed mystery-thriller shocks. And Soderbergh, aided by a sharp script and superb cast, wrong-foots us all the way.
3AW
Ripper psychological mystery-thriller...prime, sharply directed guessing game stuff full of plot surprises and great left turns.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Movies With Butter
Courtroom drama, forensic thriller, romantic murder mystery...It's as if, the prescription for genre side effects, is more genres.
ABC Radio (Australia)
At its best, it's chilling, creepy, strange and intriguing; at its worst, it's gorgeous to look at.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
American Profile
A real pill of a movie that packs a serious one-two punch as a detective drama coupled with a cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to pharma-cate our troubles away.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Quickflix
The feature evolves from an icy, haunting tale of depression and abandonment into a squalid, sordid, serpentine Alfred Hitchcock pastiche. That it can glide from these two poles with us barely realising is a testament to Soderbergh's talent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Observer [UK]
A story that plays subtle tricks with our moral allegiances.
Scotsman
An effortlessly slick medical thriller that makes no grand statements or summations beyond being effortlessly artful and entertaining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Irish Times
If this puzzling, often very enjoyable medical thriller were directed by almost any film-maker other than Steven Soderbergh, you would be tempted to diagnose it with genre identity disorder.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Birmingham Mail
It's certainly entertaining if you are willing to suspend your disbelief a little.
Electric Sheep
Another genre exercise for Soderbergh that he has managed to pull off with the help of his Hollywood friends to entertaining, if ultimately rather underwhelming, effect.
Radio Times
An intelligently crafted story, which is briskly paced and highly suspenseful - until a crude and puerile payoff in the third act.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This is London
This movie is pure hokum, just as Hitchcock's great originals are, but you only realise this after - just like all the people in the film - you have been thoroughly hooked and duped yourself.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Contactmusic.com
Thrillers don't get much more enjoyable than this one, which shifts cleverly from an issue-based drama to an intriguing mystery and finally into riotously camp mayhem.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Rip It Up
As Burns' screenplay takes yet another dark alternate route, our heavily-medicated contemporary society is fearlessly placed under the microscope.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
