The Girlfriend Experience + The Informant!

Soderbergh is synonymous with shenanigans. That's the key to understanding his famously bimodal career. Half of Soderbergh's films, the ones he's most widely known for — Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Oceanses, The Good German, The Informant! — are marquee pictures about capital capers; the wily little guy vs the slippery establishment in a lively game of shakedown, fraud and con.

The other half, the indie and art house pics that cost less than Danny Ocean's third-best suit — Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Full Frontal, Eros, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience — are actually cut from the same cloth. (As are those few mid-range art house pics, like Solaris and Che.) Collectively these lower-profile numbers represent Soderbergh's own personal shenanigans, each a prank of sorts on the audience or, better yet, the industry.

I can't help but feel like Steven really put one over when Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d'Or in 1989. After all, that's the movie that invented the James Spader Experience, which is a bit like getting slapped with a dick.

Since then Soderbergh has sub-specialized in unconventional and unmarketable formats (like the miniseries and short film collections) and used his A-list leverage to actively subvert industry standards for how films are produced and released. Bubble was shot like a film school weekend assignment and released simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and via HD cable broadcast. Studio exec: He can't do that! Can he do that? Next the guy saunters off to Spain and Mexico for three months with Benicio del Toro and sixty million dollars and comes back with a four-hour biopic of Che Guevara. Studio exec: What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Steven shrugs. (A limited art house release garnered back half the budget.)

Possibly Soderbergh's most audacious con was getting Schizopolis accepted into the Criterion Collection. Make no mistake: If you watch that movie, the joke is on you.

The Girlfriend Experience is a classic bait and switch. Come see dynamite porn star Sasha Grey in her first dramatic role — as an ultra-chic Manhattan call girl! Wowie wow. You horndogs won't be disappointed, as long as you get your rocks off watching a hooker's toadlike Wall Street clients blubber and moan into her tits over the housing market collapse.

Kudos, you bastard.