Contagion Sickeningly Good

Critics applaud Steven Soderbergh’s latest effort, Contagion, a deeply disturbing imagining of a global pandemic that features an all-star cast (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne):

• It’s “easily the scariest of the disaster films” since 9/11, writes Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. What’s more, it “takes great pains to present its situations realistically, and includes a lot of intelligent speculation about what sort of political, economic, and ethical questions would be raised by such a disaster.”

• “Soderbergh moves among genres, styles, and eras, this time by updating 1970s paranoia freakouts like All the President’s Men for the anti-government, Tea Party age,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. The result “seriously rattles your nerves.”
• In Salon, Andrew O’Hehir notes the “crisp, stripped-down storytelling that matches [Contagion's] clinical and beautifully composed images.”
• Contagion is “guaranteed to have you reaching for the Purell and bristling at uncovered coughs,” observes Peter Howell in the Toronto Star.

(And the film could even make everyone love Gwyneth again. See why.)