Side Effects Reviews
Top CriticAs a thriller in the Hitchcock mould, 'Side Effects' is great fun: its characters are well acted without being entirely likeable, which makes their jeopardy all the more enjoyable while putting us at a clinical remove.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Soderbergh is less interested in making statements than he is in skillfully fulfilling genre expectations.
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| Original Score: 7.9/10
A crafty teaser that presents itself as one kind of film before gradually evolving into another kind altogether. I, for one, enjoyed both enormously.
Steven Soderbergh is one of our best and most versatile directors.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Side Effects is a cracking thriller that ranks amongst Soderbergh's best, featuring electric performances by Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Channing Tatum.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Side Effects virtually demands a three-word review: Just see it.
The main thing to keep in mind while watching Steven Soderbergh's playful new thriller is not to take the movie too seriously or else you'll feel betrayed by the end.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns maintain a tone of taut creepiness, but the plot's double and triple crosses are more ingenious than believable.
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| Original Score: B-
"Side Effects" does a nice job teasing current anxieties about depression, medical ethics and class striving with the classic thriller quandary of "Who's playing whom?"
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| Original Score: 3/4
[It] will both keep you on your toes and at the edge of your seat.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A stylish take on the psychiatric-thriller genre that, despite progressive narrative absurdities, mostly delivers a dose to the pleasure centres.
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| Original Score: 3/4
In some ways the film is more traditional than you think it will be, becoming a psychological puzzle piece. But Soderbergh lays the puzzle out so neatly, you can't help but be engrossed.
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| Original Score: B
It's a gripping, maddening and thoroughly satisfying thriller, made with artfulness and integrity.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If this does prove to be Soderbergh's final film - and I wouldn't hold my breath - he picked a heck of a one to go out on.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely discernible.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The movie descends into a TV-grade police procedural, with twists so sharp and a plot so convoluted you may need meds to clear your head.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Side Effects was shot on digital video that makes it look as if we're peering through dirty glass, but it's still a lavishly dread-fueled suspense movie full of twists, reversals, double crosses, and dangerous liaisons.
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| Original Score: B+
The film as a whole is consistently enjoyable and sometimes thrilling, a classic Soderbergh showcase for provocative storytelling and marvelous acting.
The movie maintains its sense of style throughout, but that hardly matters as the story just gets stupider and stupider.
The film keeps viewers emotionally invested yet intellectually off-balance, suffusing even the most ostensibly straightforward scenes with a sense of free-floating anxiety.
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| Original Score: 4/4
"Side Effects" has the sleek, chic look of a Soderbergh film -- cool colors, seductive lighting -- but the script, by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns, is disappointingly clunky.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A pill-popping drama that suddenly turns into something entirely different.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Soderbergh, in what's rumored to be his final theatrical release (don't believe it), jumps from imitating the master to imitating the master imitators.
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| Original Score: B-
The fun of "Side Effects" lies in figuring out what sort of movie it is even as you're watching it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Stop reading now, avoid all reviews and blabbermouths, and go see the movie yourself before anyone tells you anything.
The movie respects a viewer's intelligence, which should also serve as a warning; don't be lulled into a stupor. Keeping sharp will allow all the fun and menace in this terrific thriller to seep into your head.
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| Original Score: 4/5
A doozy of a Hitchcockian thriller with Jude Law, Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Effects is a go-for-broke valentine to '80s cinematic psychological potboilers.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This neatly executed mystery is just the sort of thing Hollywood craves from Steven Soderbergh: genre entertainment as cool, clean, and impersonal as a Formica countertop.
The director who came into the field with Sex, Lies, and Videotape leaves it with sex and lies shot on video, still surprising us with both the stories he tells and the stories hidden inside them.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Provides a minor but distinct kind of cinematic pleasure: the joy of sitting back and letting a master manipulator mess with your head.
While the plot may be predictable (and more than a little preposterous) in retrospect, Mr. Soderbergh handles it brilliantly, serving notice once again that he is a crackerjack genre technician.
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| Original Score: 5/5
"Side Effects" goes to unexpected places, and we breathlessly follow along.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's the kind of thriller that Alfred Hitchcock might make if he was still alive and active today.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Burns' plotting gets a little knotty in the third act, but he's a smart writer, who has a knack for juggling an array of characters of varying intelligence and varying corruption levels.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Soderbergh came, he saw, he conquered, and now he's moving on.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
We'd like to believe that our SSRIs and MAOIs will bring us happiness, that love is real, that art or spirituality can offer transcendence. Steven Soderbergh would like to remind us that it's all a trick, and we're on our own.
Side Effects is a hell of a thriller, twisty, terrific and packed with surprises you don't see coming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It starts out as one type of film and ends up as another, and manages the transition seamlessly.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Steven Soderbergh keeps giving interviews confessing that he is bored with movies and promising that Side Effects will be his last one. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.
The complexity of emotion, confusion and loss at the film's start gives way to some acrobatic trickery by the end, but "Side Effects" is never less than gripping or entertaining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Side Effects points out, but never didactically, just how broken our systems have become, whether medical, governmental, or economic.
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.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Steven Soderbergh's elegantly coiled puzzler spins a tale of clinical depression and psychiatric malpractice into an absorbing, cunningly unpredictable entertainment.
Side Effects is a smooth, shapely suspense picture.
In trying to merge this alarmist theme with an old-fashioned murder mystery, the filmmakers throw at least one plot-twist sucker-punch too many, leaving the viewer with an "Oh, come on" reaction to the entire film.
It is a bugf--k crazy yarn, more like what you'd expect out of Brian De Palma, but with that ineffable hum -- the Soderbergh snap -- the cool camera, exquisite framing, shallow focus and scenes that don't last a frame longer than they have to.
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| Original Score: A-
