This latest adaptation, by director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Frank, gets it just about right.
It was written by Soderbergh's long-term collaborator, Scott Z Burns, and shot, the director says, in 35 days.
In Steven Soderbergh's psychological thriller Side Effects, a New Yorker takes pills for depression - and Prozac is inevitably mentioned.
Formally, and despite what Soderbergh has told interviewers, the picture looks less like a disaster movie than like an international thriller.
Career-wise, Zeta Jones has continued to flourish in recent years, starring in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, alongside Douglas, and blockbuster Ocean's Twelve.
Soderbergh shows us death a few times, and then he and Burns move away from individual stories and broaden the picture.
Aho is a fan of Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Steven Soderbergh.
His broadcasting life is shot in bright soft focus tones, whereas the CIA scenes are in much harsher light, like Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.
The puzzle is Mr. Soderbergh's approach to what might have been an intriguing experiment, rather than the off-putting one it turned out to be.
He appeared in 2009's The Informant with Matt Damon, and he's eyeing roles in films with directors he admires, like The Informant's Steven Soderbergh.
Hollywood auteurs like Mr. Soderbergh are trying to class things up.
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The incredible story, along with the opportunity to work with Soderbergh, who directed him in 2000's "Traffic, " for a second time drew him to the project.
Soderbergh stresses that the pharmaceutical industry is not the heart of the film but he allows that the effects of prescription drugs are a talking point.
Mysteriously, however, and to a degree that truly suggests perversity, Mr. Soderbergh seems to have done everything within his power to keep the audience at arm's length.
He generally participates in ensemble casts -- Anna Karenina, the Sherlock Holmes franchise, Soderbergh's Contagion, The Holiday -- making his singular box office appeal somewhat more elusive.
Filming on location with nonprofessional actors drawn from locals along the Ohio-West Virginia border, Steven Soderbergh revitalizes the eternal triangle with a low-key yet ravishing homespun neorealism.
More recently, the influence of Rohmer's particular style -- long takes, extended conversations on everyday topics -- can be seen in the films of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh.
On his Twitter feed, Mr Dodge encourages fans of Stephen Soderbergh's latest film Contagion, one of a string of recent Hollywood pictures about deadly pandemics, to sign up to the site.
If this is the last Soderbergh film for the big screen, as the filmmaker has been saying it is in recent interviews, the movie medium will be much poorer for it.
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Steven Soderbergh's The Good German is also in competition.
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Giving the award to Mr Del Toro would be a way of saluting a film that has been critically well received but might otherwise be the victim of that two-way Soderbergh vote.
Behind the Candelabra's director Steven Soderbergh provoked a fierce debate when he said he had to take the film to the cable station HBO because Hollywood's studios believed it was "too gay".
"I have to say it probably is the most difficult movie I've ever made, and I've made a few, " Del Toro says of his starring role in director Steven Soderbergh's Spanish-language biopic.
To paraphrase the words of Winston Churchill, who is seen in newsreel footage of the Potsdam Peace Conference in "The Good German, " Steven Soderbergh's new film is a puzzle wrapped in a mystery inside a perversity.
Only God Forgives, which reunites Drive star Ryan Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn will be in competition this year alongside Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic, Roman Polanski's Venus In Fur and Inside Llewyn Davis by the Coen brothers.
Soderbergh confirms his stature as one of the most versatile directors working today, equally capable of handling this international espionage thriller as he is comedic heist films ("Oceans" series), Epic biopics ("Che") and intimate indies ("The Girlfriend Experience").
Whereas the classics it emulates sought authenticity by filming on overseas locations, Mr Soderbergh flaunts the artifice of the genre we call film noir, recreated in the appropriate colours: blacks darker than night and whites that give off an infernal glare.
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But the pleasure of "Birders, " elegantly crafted by Jeffrey Kimball, a first-time director and longtime local birder, who previously worked as a music supervisor on films by the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant and John Sayles, is that the ultimate star is Central Park.
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