Steven Soderbergh burst onto the scene with 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, putting him at the forefront of the early 1990s indie film scene alongside directors like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and Richard Linklater.
While many of the director’s best known works, including the Ocean’s 11 films, Erin Brokovich, and Magic Mike, wouldn’t come out until the 2000s, his '90s output clearly demonstrates the remarkable range of his interests. They also show a growing interest in the rapidly advancing digital technology of the time and the DIY spirit that would often see him writing, directing, editing, and working as director of photography on his films. Here are Soderbergh's interesting '90s movies, ranked.
7 Gray’s Anatomy
Soderbergh filmed the stage performance of an 80-minute autobiographical Spalding Gray monologue during a break in post-production on Schizopolis. While the director adds scenery changes, evocative music, and lighting effects, Gray's Anatomy is much more Gray’s than Soderbergh’s, as the actor and writer recounts his experimentation with alternative medicine to treat a degenerative eye condition.
6 The Underneath
Soderbergh’s 1995 neo-noir film stars Peter Gallagher as a gambler returning to his hometown to set things right, only to be drawn back in to the criminal underworld for one last heist. The film is stylish, putting Soderbergh’s technical skills on full display, but failed to find an audience and often comes across as more of an exercise in style than a full-blooded, heartfelt story.
Despite this, there are attempts to replicate some of the psychological and philosophical depths of early film noirs like 1949's Criss Cross, of which this film is a remake, and succeeds with a few great scenes. The Underneath has the germs of the filmmaker Soderbergh was to become, but never quite comes to fruition.
5 Kafka
Soderbergh’s follow-up to the runaway success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Kafka seeks to blend the reality of the life of Franz Kafka, one of the 20th-century’s greatest writers, with the strange, nightmarish fictions that he created in order to produce a mystery-thriller. It’s a fascinating combination of elements with a magnetic Jeremy Irons performance, but one that doesn’t succeed very consistently. The film has found a bit of a cult following in recent years, and Soderbergh would re-edit it into a version titled Mr. Kneff as part of seven-film box set that was initially slated for release in late 2021 but hasn't yet seen the light of day.
4 King of the Hill
This 1993 adaptation of American author A. E. Hotchner’s coming of age story portrays a young boy played by Jesse Bradford struggling to survive on his own in a Depression-era St. Louis hotel while his mother is hospitalized with tuberculosis and his father works as a traveling salesman.
The film was nominated for a Palm d’Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, but went largely unnoticed by audiences, making back just over $1 million of its $8 million budget, but it is a small, tender, and affecting film, one of Soderbergh’s most overlooked and underrated.
3 Schizopolis
Soderbergh adds to his already hefty load of writing, directing, editing, and cinematography by taking on not one, but two starring roles in this aggressively strange film. Shot for only $250,000 in and around Soderbergh’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the film uses constant non-sequiturs to take on the absurdities of suburban life, contemporary religion, and late capitalism in general, a theme that would become increasingly important for Soderbergh.
The result is one of the strangest, most exhilaratingly innovative and bizarre movies to ever come from a major American director, and the film Soderbergh calls his “artistic wake-up call.” Its bottomless idiosyncrasies led to its being booed at its Cannes premiere and bombing at the box office, but it’s since found inclusion in the Criterion Collection and a devoted cult audience.
2 The Limey
Terrence Stamp plays a career criminal fresh out of a British prison forced to travel to Los Angeles to investigate the suspicious death of his daughter in this 1999 film. Returning to the crime genre that had served him so well in Out of Sight, Soderbergh garnered rave reviews for The Limey, with Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle calling it “a first-rate crime thriller,” one that’s “taut, imaginative and complex,” and “one of the best American films of the year.” Stamp’s performance is especially riveting, its stark intensity limned with nostalgia for his and co-star Peter Fonda’s iconic performances in the 1960s.
1 Out of Sight
A stylish, sun-soaked crime story starring George Clooney at his most incandescent, Out of Sight in many ways prefigures Ocean’s 11, but in place of that movie's intricate caper, Out of Sight revels in the chemistry between Clooney and Jennifer Lopez and a stellar supporting cast including Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, and Dennis Farina.
The plot, adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novel of the same name, sees Clooney attempting to pull off a diamond heist while simultaneously fleeing and falling in love with Lopez’s U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco. The film is gorgeous, fun, and cool in a way that would mark Soderbergh's work to come, a re-emergence of sorts after his sometimes lackluster and extremely diverse '90s output.