If Steven Soderbergh really has retired from making feature films he leaves on a high, first with the twisty pharmaceutical thriller, Side Effects, and now with this made-for-TV Liberace biopic. It’s quite a double-punch swansong that demonstrates his versatility and ability to coax great performances out of his actors. Based on Scott Thorston’s account of his six-year relationship with famed pianist, Liberace, Behind the Candelabra, reveals the not-so hidden life of one of the world’s most flamboyant performers.

Although it is a shame Soderbergh had to turn to the more adventurous HBO to finally get his long in gestation biopic made (it is hard to know quite what the studios were so worried about) little appears lost in the transition…

The film deemed to gay for Hollywood even after the much loved Brokeback Mountain is a great picture, and will continue to show my pleas to Steven Soderbergh to not give up on Cinema so we don’t lose one of the most entertaining and unique eyes in film. Though his contributions to T.V. will be something everyone should be excited for.

Behind the Candelabra the story of Pianist Liberace played terrifically by Michael Douglas and his relationship with a much younger man Scott Thorson played by Matt Damon. A film I was expecting to be way over the top and become a camp act much like Liberace’s real life stage show. But this is a warts and all story of…

No studio wanted to produce this. Director Steven Soderbergh first mentioned the project idea to Michael Douglas during the filming of Traffic in 2000, but the powers of cinemadom judged the story "too gay to be commercial," so it languished in need of backing till HBO finally took a gamble on it as a made-for-TV movie. Two Golden Globes and eleven Primetime Emmy Awards later, Soderbergh's vision is complete, and the tale of the last decade in the life of the world's most extravagant piano-playing showman has been told, masterfully.

When I first heard Douglas was going to play Liberace, I thought to myself, "No way! The guy who made it with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct? The guy who's…

"His approach to communicating with people is always to play it in a manner that reflects best on him," says Scott Thorson's adoptive father/manager in a Guardian article about Liberace's longtime lover, whose autobiography inspired Steven Soderbergh's latest movie. What Soderbergh reveals behind Liberace's candelabra -- as well as in the recent SIDE EFFECTS and THE INFORMANT -- is a world where everyone approaches all human interaction by playing it in a manner that reflects best on them, hearing and (as Lee tells his young acolyte at one point) seeing whatever serves their ever-more-desperate needs.

Douglas exudes a charismatic combination of magnanimity and monstrousness in every encounter, and credit to him and Soderbergh for pulling off the piano scenes in…