Before he aggressively undulates, gyrates, and throws himself all around the stage of the Xquisite Strip Club, the Mike of Magic Mike flexes his proverbial muscles elsewhere. When he first meets Alex Pettyfer’s Adam, he’s working on a crew under a roofing contractor in the Tampa suburbs, installing mission-style clay roof tiles with gloves and a mallet. Rather than justifiably focusing on Channing Tatum doing physical labor and sweating in the hot summer sun, the script diverts its attentions toward Mike demanding agreed upon pay and hours from his boss. That boss later busts Adam for taking more drinks and snacks than is allowed. At the heart of everything in Magic Mike is a negotiation of labor.

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Image via HBO

In almost every measure, Steven Soderbergh is an economical artist. That’s clear in the narrative turns of Magic Mike, one of his very best movies, and Logan Lucky, his imminent return from a self-imposed, half-serious retirement, wherein Tatum plays an unemployed laborer turned reluctant grand-scale thief. It’s also true of his aesthetic style and the staccato rhythm of his editing: he never wastes a shot nor does he allow the plotting to overgrow gestural notes of character or telling deliveries. For all the technical mastery that Soderbergh often showcases, his performers exude a rare freeness, an easy melding of persona with written character that brings about an unforced naturalness and resonance. The way Julia Roberts speaks, the way her face dims and brightens with dread and excitement, and the moments when she doesn’t speak at all says as much about who Erin Brockovich is as her work on the case against Pacific Gas and Electric of California in the early 1990s does.

One does not have to stride far to see allusions to Soderbergh’s perspective on his own chosen career in both his work with his actors and the way he often depicts the natural division of labor. There is only one major conflict in Contagion and Traffic – a lethal global pandemic and America’s unwinnable drug war, respectively – and the films come at them from a stratosphere of different political and economic perspectives. Michael Douglas’ judge might wield the most power in the fight to shape better domestic drug policy but losing the PR war decimates his influence, whereas the dirty, legally dubious bargains and the testimony that Benicio del Toro’s good cop can facilitate might do more for the real work of cutting down the cartels. And in Contagion, the familial love and protective nature felt by Laurence Fishburne’s CDC honcho shows an exploitable weakness for bloggers, vloggers, hot-take journalists, and the angry masses, while the real good work is done by a quiet scientist with lots of guts and not much of a social life, played by the luminous Jennifer Ehle. Just imagine if Fishburne was playing a director and Ehle was his cinematographer or set designer, and the value of the work remains, even if its urgency is moot in the face of a killer disease. And yet the jargon is always right, the pace is always steady and regularly electrifying, and the details of character, setting, expertise, and institutions are always plentiful without coming off as overly didactic.

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Image via Cinemax

With Logan Lucky, the division of labor is just as important between Riley Keough’s ace driver, Daniel Craig’s bombastic explosives expert, and Tatum’s fearless leader. The director’s instincts are as sharp as ever, which isn’t entirely surprising when you consider Soderbergh has been spending much of his retirement working on Cinemax’s groundbreaking The Knick, one of the best television programs of this or any other decade.

His natural habitat, however, is film, and in honor of his versatile career, I decided to rank all of Soderbergh’s films. (Mind you, had Behind the Candelabra, his magnificent Liberace biopic, received a theatrical release, it would have placed high here.) Even the most problematic of them offer learnable lessons about the business of making movies, putting him in a rarified class of American filmmakers: ones who make movies that are consistently both imminently entertaining and unexpectedly audacious.

27. 'Full Frontal'

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Full Frontal is not very memorable, and that’s not something you can often say about a Soderbergh joint. Made at the time when plenty of remarkable directors were making extremely ugly movies on digital, this 2002 whatsit feels like a jumble of ideas spread out across a series of disjointed exchanges between a gang of talented actors, including Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood, David Duchovny, and David Hyde Pierce. Like much of the director’s work, the question of how much a performer gives of them, and how much they simply create, is plumbed but not much else happens. Seen exclusively as a response to the advances of digital filmmaking and its promise of clarity above all, there’s a certain level of angst in what Soderbergh loosely orchestrates here but it never comes together.

26. 'Ocean's Twelve'

A titanic bore. If this sequel to Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven is worth anything, its in the cast that the director assembles and his own cinematography under the moniker Peter Andrews, which together tests the limitations of polishing turds. The script by Greg Nolfi sends George Clooney’s Danny Ocean and his merry gang of grifters over to Europe to recoup the money they stole from Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), while fending off maturity and expert jewel thief Tolour (Vincent Cassel). The pacing is brisk and enveloping but much like Full Frontal, the whole movie feels like a loose stringing together of sketches about Ocean’s team, only about a third of which are worth anything. Extra demerit for including Bruce Willis in a meta role.

25. 'The Good German'

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War journalist Jake Geismer (George Clooney) is covering the Potsdam Conference in Berlin when he gets ensnared in the murder of his driver, the belligerent Tully (Tobey Maguire), who had a secretive connection to Geismer’s mistress, Lena (Cate Blanchett). Paul Attanasio, a long way from his script for Robert Redford’s majestic Quiz Show, goes for intricacy but hits convoluted instead, adding revelations and subplots that drag down Soderbergh’s lean production. Just as problematic is the conceit of Soderbergh attempting to replicate the look of famed Howard Hawks and Jules Dassin noirs, only with his own experiments in framing and blocking to give a bit of personality. As an experiment, it’s amiable and well-acted but there’s no heart to it, no sense that Soderbergh or Attanasio saw anything of themselves in the material other than a fondness for an outdated style. It may be the only truly nostalgic movie Soderbergh has ever made, and here’s hoping he never falls back again.

24. 'Ocean's Thirteen'

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Image via Warner Bros.

The main thing Ocean’s Thirteen has over Ocean’s Twelve is the additions to cast. Al Pacino is giddily over-the-top as Willy Bank, a real estate mogul who cuts Reuben (Elliott Gould) out of a lucrative deal and sends him to the hospital. In comes Danny and the cavalry to right this wrong, sending in Matt Damon’s Linus to seduce Bank’s right-hand woman (Ellen Barkin) while the rest of the gang tempt Bank into a scheme to take away the glory of his new hotel opening. The general tone is more overtly goofy here and that’s appreciated in comparison to the half-baked notions about criminal responsibility in Ocean’s Twelve. Soderbergh still pushes his writers and performers to lean on invention over all, so things remain surprisingly fresh but there’s no substance here whatsoever.

23. 'The Underneath'

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An efficient, propulsive, and stylish little thriller that often gets buried amongst the taller peaks of Soderbergh’s 90s output. Unlike his tactics in The Good German, the director envisions this remake of the noir classic Criss Cross entirely in his own style, even if it hadn’t developed much in the six years since sex, lies, and videotape. Still, he makes a handsome production out of this tale of a rehabilitated gambling addict (Peter Gallaghar) who goes straight but is sucked back into the world of crime via his ex-wife’s new beau (William Fichtner). Soderbergh stresses the struggles to maintain a job and a tame social life in the wake of addiction, which gives the film a splash of genuine curiosity and thoughtfulness, but more times than not, the filmmaker uses his time to hone his talents at building and diffusing tension. To be fair, he proves to be a veritable master at that very thing.

22. 'Schizopolis'

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It’s difficult to discuss just what exactly is going on here, but it involves the relationship between a self-help drone and a dentist, both played by Soderbergh in a surprisingly resonant and anxious pair of performances. There are flourishes of abstract symbolic imagery that suggest an ode to Godard but there’s something far more rueful about the overall tone of the movie. Watching it in the moment, there are stretches where Soderbergh’s plan seems to be “confuse them and then run,” but the overall feeling is that of refusal to play by the accepted dictates of narrative and frustration at its limitations, a feeling that fans of his should be used to.

21. 'Bubble'

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The most genuinely effective of Soderbergh’s early-to-mid-aughts experimental features. Re-teaming with Coleman Hough, the writer behind Full Frontal, Soderbergh uses non-professional performers to bring to life this small and short tale of a murder in a small Midwestern town where a doll factory is one of the few viable employers left around. Its not an entirely memorable movie, aside from Debbie Doebereiner’s stunning lead performance, but it’s a hotbed of technical and visual ideas that Soderbergh deploys in a fever. Though never boring, the entire thrust of the movie feels more dictated by the boundaries Soderbergh knowingly set for himself than anything else, making much of its action feel overtly staged and its vision of a world with less and less available physical and factory labor begins to feel more for show than anything else.

20. 'Kafka'

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Soderbergh has been working on a new director’s cut of this black-and-white surrealist thriller for over a year at least at this point. It’s the upcoming release I am most impatient to see, despite most of the director’s second film having been shot in 1989 and 1990. Back when it was released in the early 1990s, reactions were primarily indifferent toward this fantastical twist on the life of Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) around the time he was writing “The Metemorphosis,” borrowing freely from “The Trial” and “The Castle.” Arriving in the aftermath of sex, lies, and videotape, it must have come off as a stray foul ball but today, Soderbergh’s conflation of texts and fantastical biography is a consistently intriguing prospect.

This is also the movie where Soderbergh’s love for Orson Welles is most apparent. An early shot of a group of aristocrats stuffing their faces in the moments before a bomb decimates them is nearly identical to the tilted, furious close-ups in Citizen Kane, Chimes at Midnight, and Welles’ own audacious adaptation of The Trial. There are also hints of another famous tale of persecution: Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

In the aftermath of that same bombing, Kafka becomes the main suspect and loses his job underneath a demanding, traditionalist boss (Alec Guinness). The movie depicts Kafka in a moment of artistic and political transformation and locates the influence in the ideas and scenes that he wrote in his novels and stories of the era. It’s not as technically assured as sex, lies, and videotape or, for that matter, King of the Hill, Soderbergh’s next film, but even at an early age, Soderbergh revealed himself to be an antic, studied visual artist skeptical of repeating himself.

19. 'Solaris'

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Image via 20th Century Fox

From the outset, there may be no more alarming sentence in modern filmmaking than “I want to remake a Tarkovsky movie.” It’s just not done, and for whatever the Russian master’s legacy as one of the great titans of the cinema, his films were never a box office draw on stateside. So, Soderbergh’s intent on rethinking Solaris, one of the bar-none most influential foreign films ever released, was a bit of a controversy before he even cast polished Hollywood star George Clooney as the space-bound psychologist on the mission to the mysterious Solaris, where memories, fears, and dreams become inseparable from reality.

Surprisingly, Soderbergh’s take is a thrilling specimen, even if it never touches the grandeur and philosophical heft of Tarkovsky’s original. For the director, the movie offers a chance to experiment with non-linear storytelling in a distinctly ghostly setting – a spaceship manned by Clooney’s Chris Kelvin, Viola Davis’ Gordon, and Jeremy Davies’ Snow. Kelvin is haunted by memories of his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), but there’s also a sense that she never died or that she has yet to die, leading to frustration, violence, and chaos on his ship. For those who glommed onto Arrival’s clever narrative trickery, this might become your holy grail, though Soderbergh is smart enough not to tie things up quite as neatly as Denis Villeneuve did. Indeed, in Soderbergh’s vision of loss and grief at the edge of the universe, nothing is fully resolved and it becomes hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead.

18. 'King of the Hill'

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An undervalued gem of the director’s 90s output that was resuscitated by its release on the Criterion label, King of the Hill now feels like one of Soderbergh’s most simple and satisfying tales to date. Based on A.E. Hotchner’s memoir of growing up on his own in Depression-era Missouri, Soderbergh’s third film confronts imagination run wild, as Jesse Bradford’s Aaron must survive without parenting or much of any supervision while still trying to make it through elementary school. In the aftermath of Kafka, Soderbergh must have realized that the overseers weren’t always going to have his back. (In fact, they were rarely going to have his back unless he made them money.) In hindsight, for all the great sense of visual and dialectical detail that the director showcases here, King of the Hill is ultimately about the importance of self-reliance and self-restraint, knowing that you’re on the level when everything else drops out.

17. 'Ocean's Eleven'

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Image via Warner Bros.

Yes, it’s still as good as you remember. This remake of a not very good Rat Pack joint underlines the entire artistic philosophy of Soderbergh, utilizing a gang of barely reformed, low-level criminals to take down corrupt casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). The different tricks of performance and technical skills that each member brings to the table reflects Soderbergh’s own rag-tag team of creatives, working to mount a massive Hollywood blockbuster on a modest-ish budget. There’s no doubt that having George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and the late Bernie Mac headlining your project helps the cause, but revisiting the movie, its as much about where editor Stephen Mirrione cuts or where Soderbergh, acting as his own DP again, decides to place the camera as it is about how Ocean’s team set-up the final brushstroke of their heist with the SWAT-team getaway. Over 15 years later, its still an ideal Hollywood production.

16. 'Gray's Anatomy'

In this filmed monologue, the late, ingenious Spalding Gray talks about all the ways that he attempted to avoid getting surgery for Macular pucker, a rare affliction of the eye. He spoke at length with Christian Scientists and visited Native American sweat lodges, as well as something referred to as a psychic surgeon. The language, courtesy of Gray and co-writer Renee Shafransky, is dense, hilarious, rhythmic, and detailed, and Soderbergh uses his framing talents sparingly here, giving just enough to remind you that he’s there without overshadowing Gray and his talk. Soderbergh clearly saw something of himself in Gray trying literally every route but the most obvious one to cure himself, seeing his own challenges with using familiar modes of expression to get his point across as a storyteller in Gray’s medical dilemma. And of course, in return, he makes Gray’s Anatomy more than either a documentary or a simple recorded stage piece, but rather a wholly unique kind of narrative built around one man, aided only by his unparalleled creative mind and memory.

15. 'The Informant!'

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Image via Warner Bros.

The story of Mark Whitacre, a high-paid corporate stooge turned whistleblower against food processing giant Archer Daniels Midland, is rendered an utterly unique experience in Soderbergh’s take on upper management. Before he even turns informant on ADM with the help of the FBI, most prominently represented by Scott Bakula and Joel McHale, Whitacre (an uproarious Matt Damon) is seen as being obsessed with the pulse-pounding narratives of John Grisham and Michael Crichton novels and movie adaptations, and it’s seemingly the feigned anti-corporate tone of those books that makes him believe that he is separate from their price-fixing and general dirty deeds. He isn’t, and when it becomes clear that Whitacre is just as guilty as the higher-ups he fingered, all hell breaks loose.

The use of storied comedic improvisers, including Tom Papa, Patton Oswalt, McHale, and Tony Hale amongst others, underlines Soderbergh’s fascination with people who make up their own stories as they go along. That’s what Mark does in his own head with Soderbergh leaning heavy on Damon’s voiceover work to give us a sense of Whitacre’s free-flowing inner monologue of factoids, injustices, business ideas, and quotidian tasks. Indeed, the great triumph of The Informant! is in how Soderbergh reveals corporate espionage as inherently mundane and yet still finds something almost perversely fascinating about the men and women who indulge such trespasses.

14. 'Side Effects'

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Soderbergh’s final film released in theaters before his “retirement” is a throwback of sorts to the psychological thrillers of the 1990s, focusing on the relationship between psychiatrist, Dr. Banks (Jude Law), and his murderous new patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara). Mrs. Taylor stabbed her husband (Channing Tatum) to death but doesn’t clearly remember the act, and she actively works with Banks to get her defense together and airtight. Then the sexual intrigue kicks in, with Banks being implicated in having an affair with Emily with the help of another doctor, Dr. Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Soderbergh sees medication and diagnosis as a way of building a convincing psychological and physiological narrative, even when a far darker reasoning becomes apparent while Banks looks into his work with Emily and her past. As a seemingly final word on how the drive for a peerless narrative corrupts institutions, from art to the legal system, Side Effects is at once furious and eerily subdued, itself feeling like a complex, enflamed tangle of occurrences falsely straightened out and made clear in the name of mental digestibility.

13. 'Unsane'

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Image via Fingerprint Releasing / Bleecker Street

A Shock Corridor for the #MeToo movement. Shooting on an iPhone with a limited cast, led by The Crown’s Claire Foy, Jay Pharaoh, and Joshua Leonard, Soderbergh carefully yet exuberantly pulls a thread of bureaucratic paranoia as Foy’s Sawyer Valentini finds herself committed to a mental institution after admitting she has suicidal thoughts on occasion. When its time to take her pills, she recognizes one of the orderlies as her stalker who made her leave Boston after a series of awkward run-ins; he denies the allegations full stop. What follows is a uniquely brutal vision of female life controlled, contained, and bled of all joy by a system that, even when run by women, tends to protect and favor any given man. The script, courtesy of James Greer and Jonathan Bronstein, is lean and lively at every turn and for whatever limitations the technology might have presented, Soderbergh’s visual dynamism doesn’t feel remotely hemmed in. The violence on display is some of the most grisly and unsettling that Soderbergh has depicted thus far and his criticisms are no less unflinching, presenting an entirely convincing case study of the ceaseless, incurable trauma that often comes from being “loved” by a man.

12. 'Out of Sight'

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Soderbergh meets Elmore Leonard and the sparks fly. Where Leonard’s Jackie Brown helped Quentin Tarantino find his inner Douglas Sirk, Out of Sight brings out Soderbergh’s love for New Hollywood crime dramas, the sort fashioned by Stuart Rosenberg and Peter Yates in the early 1970s. Soderberg’s style here is lush yet never precious, giving full bloom to the seductive tete-a-tete between George Clooney’s smooth criminal and Jennifer Lopez’s hard-edged US marshal on the go. Rarely has Soderbergh brought out as much character in a city as he does with Detroit, where Clooney’s thief must enter a deal with a local would-be kingpin (Don Cheadle) to rob the home of a corrupt banker (Albert Brooks). Underneath the bubbly yet surprisingly resonant drama, Soderbergh considers questions of rehabilitation and influence, but this is one of those rare cases in his career where the sheer entertainment value of the film outweighs the thematic density of his work, and that’s could only possibly be seen as a bad thing in the eyes of a perfectionist like Soderbergh.

11. 'The Girlfriend Experience'

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Image via Magnolia

In a sense, Chelsea, the escort played by adult film star Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, represents Soderbergh at the height of his worth in Hollywood, and at his most potently enraged as an artist. The two films that preceded The Girlfriend Experience were Ocean’s Thirteen, one of his most populist-leaning films, and Che, his astounding yet commercially and even critically disastrous look at the life of the Cuban revolutionary, an experience that left him openly bitter about the business of making movies. The constant talk of luxury brands, in the work of a high-end prostitute, suggests at once a critical, self-deprecating view of Soderbergh’s art and employment, mirroring it in the work of a well-dressed, well-fed call girl, as well as the distasteful amount of wealth and selling of products that goes into filmmaking. All of this goes towards the tailoring of an image, which relates both to the creation of movie imagery but also of how he, as an artist, must sell himself to producers, investors, and studio heads.

The molding of a particular look is also integral to her boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), a personal trainer who is looking to branch out into exercise apparel and as a part of a larger corporate structure. In essence, the couple represents two experiences of getting images made, one through carefully chosen design and performance, the other through work, healthy living, and honest salesmanship. It should come as no surprise that the latter is the less successful route, as we watch Chris fail to get a foothold at a sports equipment store or a more high-scale gym than the one he works out of; he can’t even get a promotion at the gym he’s at, in fact. It goes back to an ugly, bewildering truth about making movies, one that Joe Swanberg discussed at his SXSW speech a few years ago: if you have no money, everyone wants to say no to your idea, whereas when you have money already, everyone wants to give you much more.

10. 'Erin Brockovich'

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Image via Universal Pictures

One of Soderbergh’s most popular movies, with good reason. In the 1990s, Brockovich, a single mother of three barely scraping by in the California suburbs, forced her way into a legal assistant job at Masry & Vititoe that, on paper, she was not qualified for at all. Her passion became sifting through the various complaints against California’s Pacific Gas and Electric, who had been pouring deadly hexavalent chromium into the water supply in Hinkley, causing a host of serious medical conditions, many of which were terminal or fatal.

What Soderbergh sees in Brockovich and Susannah Grant’s superb script is likely the same as what Ed Masry (Albert Finney) saw: a born problem solver. Grant and Soderbergh present Brockovich as a master of invention on an extremely lean budget, making up a story for her kids so that they don’t worry about her not eating and utilizing an untrustworthy babysitter in the name of cheap prices. It’s the kind of mind that works hard and successfully for the people of Hinkley, but it’s also what begins to drive away George (Aaron Eckhart), her new neighbor and eventual boyfriend.

As is often the case in Soderbergh’s movies, professional talent and love of work are celebrated but that same take-charge attitude causes an imbalance, even strife at home. There’s a happy ending, on both levels, but unlike so many of these types of class-action-suit dramas, the climactic victories feel earned and never over-played. Roberts won the Oscar for her role here and if there’s a performance more worthy of the honor in her oeuvre, I haven’t seen it.

9. 'And Everything Is Going Fine'

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The monologist Spalding Gray took his own life in 2004, when his body was found in the East River after he reportedly jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. There is not much about his death in Soderbergh’s graceful assemblage of footage of Gray from throughout his life – in movies, on stage, being interviewed on TV, etc. – but he certainly gets at his struggles with depression and disease. He allows the late artist to speak for himself and to tell the story of his life the way that he wanted it to be presented to the public. Some footage shows tracking damage while other snippets feature blown-out color and light balances, suggesting different sides of his personality as well as a brief visual history of how performance is recorded, leading all the way up to the advent of digital cameras. Professional and societal insights abound in Gray’s monologues and extended exchanges but what makes And Everything Is Going Fine so moving is the story of a man who could seemingly talk endlessly about anything until he seemingly lost the will to face himself and what was happening to him.

8. 'The Limey'

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“You tell him I’m fucking coming!” This is where Soderberg’s love for 1960s era neo-noirs like Jack Smight’s Harper and John Boorman’s Point Blank comes out most strongly. The titular man of reckoning, Wilson (Terence Stamp in fine form), is straight out of prison and on the hunt for Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), the sleazy record producer who he believes is complicit in his daughter’s death. Soderbergh films Los Angeles with a melancholic breeziness, a land for the restless and spiritually exhausted, and it breaks out into dramatic compositions, such as when Wilson raids an office looking for his prey. Fury, resentment, guilt, and grief blend together in Wilson’s war against Valentine, interrupted for lovely interludes with fellow ex-con Eduardo (Luiz Guzman) and Lesley Anne Warren’s Elaine, Wilson’s friends and neighbors in the small seaside community where he plots. There’s even an element of the greatest of all noirs, Touch of Evil, in how these seemingly small-scale men of bad fortune seem so towering in Soderbergh’s view, molded by years of regret, fear, violence, and indulgence.