Friday Matinee

Out of Sight

Steven Soderbergh’s crime comedy masterwork Out of Sight, adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard, showed that George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez had bona fide movie star chops and served as an entrée to Hollywood filmmaking for Soderbergh, which led, in short order, to his Best Director Oscar win for Traffic and his helming of the Ocean’s 11 franchise. Clooney is Jack Foley, a prolific bank robber whose “meet cute” with Lopez’s Karen Sisco takes place in the middle of his escape from jail. The two get acquainted and fall for each other in a car trunk, of all places, but that doesn’t stop Sisco from tracking and trying to capture Foley before he can pull off the fabled “one last job” every criminal needs to get out of the business and away from the long arm of the law. Their stories, told with a playfully fractured chronology, sweep you up and have you believing again in romance, or at least the moving picture industry’s version of it.

“Clooney has never been better.” – Roger Ebert

“Out Of Sight works both as a great romance and a great, unconventional crime thriller. But step back from such distinctions, and it just looks like a great movie.” – Keith Phipps, AV Club

“For once in a mainstream production, the narrative machinery works on all cylinders without any wasted motion or fatuous rhetoric. They don’t make movies like this anymore, in this overcalculated and overtested era.” – Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer

“As always with the best of Leonard, it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts, and director Soderbergh has let it unfold with dry wit and great skill. Making adroit use of complex flashbacks, freeze frames and other stylistic flourishes, he’s managed to put his personal stamp on the film while staying faithful to the irreplaceable spirit of the original.” – Kevin Turan, Los Angeles Times