6/28/2023 0 Comments No sudden move review![]() Which brings us to what might be the most important function of those lenses: they create an extremely limited depth of field, with only one very specific part of the frame in focus at any time. They’re just people in the middle of this enormous story, with no possible idea of what’s surrounding it all. This leads to a feeling that the ultimate social and global context is shoehorned into the film, until we consider that this is just how the characters would be experiencing everything. For much of the film this is only under the surface-we hear Cheadle reference the destruction of some black neighborhoods, but only during one awkward conversation, and there’s little indication of the much, much larger picture we eventually see. Detroit is a city of progress, technologically and, as we learn, in terms of city planning, with neighborhoods being razed and highways being built, something that’s far more welcome in some circles than in others. This is mid-century Detroit, after all, and cars are everywhere-we’re either in cars, talking about using cars, or seeing two or three cars in the background. But these lenses also create a disorienting distortion that in the larger shots made me feel a bit carsick at times-a curious through-the-looking-glass sensation made curiouser by the fact that so much of the movie is based in automobile culture. Soderbergh shoots the film with extreme lenses that allow him to squeeze into tight spaces, which makes for some thrilling camerawork in the interior scenes, and often makes it seem as if we’re looking through a peephole, spying at what’s going on. ![]() Cheadle is partnered with Benicio del Toro, another of the zillion familiar faces in the film, and the two work together, eventually by necessity, to navigate double- and triple-crosses, to make some sense of where it all goes, and to climb the ladder to the guy behind the guy behind the guy, and the promise of more money. The movie takes place in Detroit in 1954, as Don Cheadle’s small-time criminal Curtis Goynes has just gotten out of prison and is approached by Brendan Fraser-looking not entirely unlike Orson Welles in Touch of Evil-who offers Cheadle $5,000 to help force a mid-level auto exec to rob some mysterious document from a coworker at his company. That Soderbergh and screenwriter Ed Solomon have told this story through the lens of one of Soderbergh’s crime caper films is one of many clever moves the two make. ![]() And for the rest of the world, the stakes are even higher. Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move tells of a few people at a major inflection point in American history-people who can only really see what’s in front of them, but for whom the stakes are incredibly high. Huge events are made up of many moving parts, involving people we never see, or even really consider. There are, of course, a lot of stories, big and small, going on all the time.
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