The Girlfriend Experience: Critic Reviews

The Girlfriend Experience is one of Steven Soderbergh's bite-size, semi-improvised, shot-on-DV doodles, and it's the best one he's made

When the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.

I don't think Soderbergh has ever missed quite as badly as this: a shallow, negligent piece of work, badly acted and casually put together.

The life of an upscale hooker: Even in the throes of passion, it's beyond bland.

Soderbergh taps into the nervy impulses of his earliest endeavor, sex, lies and videotape as well as Ocean's Eleven. The Girlfriend Experience has something to elevate and exasperate fans of both.

What could seem an empty stylistic exercise (and was, in the director's 2002 Full Frontal) serves to bring a fresh urgency to the tale, ultimately granting the audience a wisdom and perspective the characters never possess.

Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation -- projecting an on-screen self-confidence that's indistinguishable from pathos.

Nowhere near as kinky or thinky as Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape, Girlfriend pretends it has more on its mind than it really does.

Like its protagonist, the film is pretty to look at, but emotionally chilly; conceptually rich, but narratively unfulfilling.

Most of the dialogue is listless, and no matter how much Soderbergh snips and stitches, the movie is a corpse with twitching limbs.

This film is true about human nature. It clearly it sees needs and desires. It is not universal, but within its particular focus, it is unrelenting.

It's a modest success that makes one wish Soderbergh could find some happy middle ground between funky experiments and Ocean's Eleven.

Coldly voyeuristic, the film is a piece of cultural anthropology that doesn't even pretend to get into the soul of its characters.

Nobody listens in this film; everyone's just waiting for their turn to talk. At the end of the movie, everyone is alone and you have the feeling they'll stay that way.

After it's over, it quickly vanishes from memory, and viewers are on to the next transaction.

Despite the pic's erotic subject matter and star (vet porn diva Sasha Grey), nothing could be less sensationalistic -- or moralistic -- than this fascinating study of free enterprise in free fall.

Like a stag movie as conceived by the editors of the Financial Times.

The movie ends so abruptly (it runs a scant 77 minutes), it's a toss-up as to whether Soderbergh was trying to make an auteur statement or simply lost his mojo.

This is one of the director's small, experimental, semi-improvised provocations, and if it doesn't push too deep, it's pointed enough to leave a mark.

Though the result is thematically slight, it's structurally sophisticated enough to reward a second viewing (or at least, unlike Grey's previous work, to be watched all the way through).

The director's ruthlessly unsentimental depiction of Christine's lifestyle makes for fascinating, albeit distanced, voyeurism.

The effect is impressionistic and provocative, with the emphasis falling differently on scenes because of our knowledge or lack thereof. It also serves to view the "girlfriend experience" as a kind of performance art.

What makes The Girlfriend Experience a fresh provocation is not the new ways available to build a fantasy but the near-impossibility of negotiating one you can actually believe in.

An exquisitely filmed piece of urban impressionism that, unfortunately, leaves one feeling that a sleek gadget has been needlessly purchased.