Steven Soderbergh on Jaws

When I spoke to Steven Soderbergh about his latest film Black Bag earlier this year, we spent some time at the end of the interview talking about Jaws. It was such a thrill to see how passionate he was about this film, which has remained a source of inspiration and fascination throughout his entire career. With Jaws celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, Soderbergh's enthusiastic appraisal of the film can be read that the BFI website now.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/steven-soderbergh-jaws-every-time-i-look-film-it-gets-better

Black Bag in Sight & Sound

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Steven Soderbergh to discuss his low-budget ghost movie Presence, and a few weeks ago I was privileged enough to have a follow-up conversation with him. This time we were talking about Black Bag, his slick and very enjoyable thriller about marriage between spies, which is material tailor-made for Soderbergh's style and sensibilities. He is always a terrific interviewee and you can read my piece on him in the April 2025 issue of Sight & Sound, which is on sale now.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a portrait of three women who live in the shadow of their family’s patriarch. The film opens with Iman (Missagh Zareh) being appointed as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran; it's a role that will earn him a significantly higher salary and allow him to move his family to a bigger house in a better community. Iman has toiled as a lawyer for years and sees this as his overdue reward, but his more high-profile role comes with dangers. “You must be irreproachable,” his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) warns their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).

Read the rest of my review at The Skinny

Hard Truths

We’ve all had days when you wake up in a funk and feel like everyone was put on earth specifically to antagonise you, but that’s every day for Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the protagonist in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths.

Read the rest of my review at The Skinny

Presence in Sight & Sound

I had the great pleasure of talking to Steven Soderbergh about his latest experiment Presence, a small-scale haunted house movie in which Soderbergh, as the camera operator, plays the role of the ghost. You can read my interview with him in the March 2025 issue of Sight & Sound, which is on sale now.