Traffic

Soderbergh's film uses a level-headed approach. It watches, it observes, it does not do much editorializing. The hopelessness of anti-drug measures is brought home through practical scenarios, not speeches and messages -- except for a few.

Steven Soderbergh's great, despairing squall of a film, Traffic, may be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's Nashville to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid-washed palette.

Benicio Del Toro... has the film actor's state of grace: he charms while he acts, not by trying to charm.

Enormously ambitious and masterfully made, Traffic represents docudrama-style storytelling at a very high level.

Yet another indication of how accomplished a filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has become.

Traffic's engines are already revved when it starts, with a drug bust in the Mexican desert, and it careers through its multiple stories with a documentary-style urgency that never lets up.

It is a legitimately epic film. [Full review in Spanish]

Soderbergh's movie is so full of action and event, it's not easy to signal out the most brilliant moments.

[It's] a complex, compelling ensemble drama about the morass that is the drug problem in this country today. Working at the top of his game and with a superior cast, director Steven Soderbergh vividly presents several distinct but interconnected stories.

In an ensemble of more than a dozen major roles and a hundred speaking roles, not a single performance misfires. [A stand-out is] Del Toro, whose quiet, intent, soulful performance should at last make him a star (if there is justice in this world).