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My Favorite Director

 Just consider the Steven Soderbergh filmography. Not only "Sex, Lies, Videotape," "Erin Brockovich," "Ocean's Eleven," "Magic Mike," "Contagion." But also "Side Effects," "Unsane," "Let Them All Talk." I love these movies. They are smart, weird, and unpredictable.


The new film "Presence" is a retelling of "The Sopranos," if "The Sopranos" were a ghost story. A mom is breaking various laws; she tells herself she is doing it to support her family (especially her son). Her husband is complicit; he seems to think he deserves absolution because he has various secret meetings about the possibility of divorce. (Like Carmela Soprano, the husband doesn't really act on the advice he receives.) Husband and wife worry--just a bit--about their wayward teens, but the parenting we see is mostly ineffective. (In one of the most brutal scenes, the man says to the woman, "Have you ever noticed that all your solutions to our daughter's issues boil down to one sentence....We should do nothing...")

It's still sort of revolutionary to put such unsympathetic characters on the big screen. Generally, a mass-market film has protagonists with a certain neediness: The protagonists work to ensure that we love them. Soderbergh's subversive approach to character makes his work special.

There is a story in "Presence," and it's surprising and elegant. But it's not the reason to buy a ticket. The main reason is the chance to see Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan.

The month of January is sometimes called "Dumpuary," because studios dump their bad movies into these frigid weeks. But we had a really strong January, oddly enough. "Presence," "One of Them Days," "The Damned": All are worth seeing.

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