Popular reviews

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  Review by sree ★★★ 16

  why are there so many movies about james spader having sex

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  Review by Alex_Lillquist ★★★★★ 7

  I was always peeved that this film won the Palme d'Or over Spike Lee's film. So much that when I first watched it, a few years ago when I was getting started in film, I turned it off after 15 minutes and claimed it to be one of those film classics that I didn't approve of. Because I was being edgy back then. Finally coming back for a full viewing on a Saturday afternoon, I prove my young self-worth wrong again. It's truly amazing at just how mesmerizing, audacious, and downright sexy Soderbergh’s debut is.

  It's been said that Sex, Lies, and Videotape is the independent film that got mainstream audiences into independent films and while that was certainly true…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 1

  Only an actor of the caliber of James Spader can play an incel and volcel at the same time.

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★★ 3

  A movie about sex with no sex in it!

  This is a weird movie. Having just seen All That Jazz, it’s bizarre to me that these two films are only 10 years apart. It might as well be 25. It feels so firmly planted in the 90s.

  Great breakout for Soderbergh and great performances all around. It’s a cast of 4 and they all hold their own. I was expecting Andie Macdowell to impress me but Laura San Giacomo was incredible! I’d never seen her before and she gave a equally powerful performance.

  I don’t know why I liked this movie. I don’t think I really understand it, but it sticks with you.

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 11

  -Sex as a form of illusional self-empowerment AND a justification of living a double life
  -Lies as a mechanism to justify said double life and a means to psychologically deny your own problems as a social being
  -Videotape as a form of distancing yourself from your surrounding reality, beginning by your own, and confronting yourself and your deceptive fantasies from a third-person perspective

  From Polanski and Zanussi (interestingly enough, both debuts) to Pasolini, the third party triggers the hidden emotional mechanisms of a marriage slowly disintegrating to shatter it to pieces, but passively, not directly interfering in what is fundamentally wrong with the protagonistic relationship, but rising to the surface the unspoken truths that are causing a consciously unspoken lack…

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  Review by nora ★★★★½ 2

  agent: hey james, this director wants you for a part.
  james spader: what's the character like?
  agent: so he's got this fetish—
  james spader: i'm in.

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  Review by Taylor Williams ★★★★★ 3

  Been wanting to watch this for a while, and I might just have a new screenplay gold standard.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★★ 2

  93/100

  Perhaps my greatest cinematic "rule-proving" exception, as I generally hate overt therapy onscreen yet am reliably hypnotized by this film's relentless emotional probing. It begins, of course, in an actual therapist's office, but Graham usurps that role almost immediately; Spader's hushed, weirdly deliberate cadence—the sense of quiet invasiveness—sort of masks the degree to which his barrage of (very) personal questions, both in taped sessions and ostensibly everyday conversation, echo what a determined mental-health professional might ask. The story is basically a (heteronormative) version of Teorema in which candor replaces fucking as the destructive/liberating force...which actually does sound like something I'd adore, so there you go. But this is also just an astonishingly confident, accomplished debut (assuming we discount his…

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  Review by Quintin 📽 Philipson ★★★½ 2

  I actually think all movies should be titled as the three most important elements in the film.

  Shrek: Ogre, swamp, and onions
  Citizen Kane: Newspapers, snow globes, and Rosebud
  Psycho: Showers, taxidermy, and blood
  Velocipastor: Ninjas, Merman, and dragon warrior
  La La Land: Emma, fucking, Stone

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  Review by Muriel ★★★★★ 1

  every single line of dialogue feels crucial to the film as a whole, everything comes full circle. amazing how this won the palme d’or in 1989 and wild at heart won the following year, they were really out here awarding the horniest films.

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  Review by Evan Eaton ★★★★½

  Addiction and angst hidden under the sheets, the erotic power of words taking a strong precedence over what would usually be sexually explicit imagery demanded by the studios. Long before the paranoid psycho-sexual tension of Eyes Wide Shut graced the screen, Sex, Lies, and Videotape was already batting in a similar ballpark. Even with its clothes on Soderbergh’s debut is as ominously voyeuristic as they come, an unmissable early work teeming with complex characters, albeit slightly stunted by its unsuitably optimistic endnote.

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  Review by FilmApe ★★★★ 8

  James Spader loves ice tea.