Side Effects Movie Review

Posted by Charmaine Blake on Feb 6th, 2013 in Crime, Drama, New Releases, Thriller | 0 comments

Side Effects Movie Review

Rooney Mara, the actress behind Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo returns to the big screen as the main star of Steven Soderbergh’s thriller, Side Effects. Starring also in this film are Channing Tatum, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jude Law. A lot of critics have been giving praise to Rooney Mara for being a chameleon on the silver screen. Her portrayal in Side Effects gave everyone something to talk about. According to Rotten Tomatoes, this new movie earned 88% fresh ratings from top critics and Metacritic gave this new film a score of 69 out of 100. So what do the critics have to say about this new movie? Check out the movie review from Justin Chang below:

“Side Effects: A Beautiful Puzzler Spins A Complex Tale of Depression and Malpractice

What begins as a barbed satire of our pill-popping, self-medicating society morphs into something intriguingly different in “Side Effects.” Steven Soderbergh’s elegantly coiled puzzler spins a tale of clinical depression and psychiatric malpractice into an absorbing, cunningly unpredictable entertainment that, like much of his recent work, closely observes how a particular subset of American society operates in a needy, greedy, paranoid and duplicitous age. Discriminating arthouse audiences not turned off by the antidepressant-heavy subject matter should be held shrink-rapt by what Soderbergh, after years of flirting with retirement, has said will be his last picture “for a long time.”

Establishing a mood of grim foreboding with a brief glimpse of a blood-spattered domestic scene, the film rewinds three months to the incident that sets things in motion. Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), a New Yorker in her mid-20s, awaits the prison release of her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), a former business exec who has just finished serving four years for his involvement in an insider-trading scheme. But the couple’s happy reunion is complicated not only by Martin’s period of readjustment and unemployment, but also by Emily’s ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression.

The story is thus immediately rooted in an easily recognizable and, for some, relatable world of financial difficulty and pharmaceutical overreliance. After Emily’s condition declines to the point of attempting self-harm, she sees a psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who puts her on a try-this-try-that regimen of drugs that include Prozac, Zoloft and Ablixa. The names of these antidepressants and their assorted side effects are rattled off with cheeky proficiency in the well-researched script by Scott Z. Burns (“Contagion,” “The Informant!”), and soon Emily starts to manifest the byproducts of so much medication, including nausea, a heightened libido and a disturbing habit of sleepwalking.

Soderbergh’s sinuous HD camerawork (done under his usual pseudonym, Peter Andrews) maintains an unnervingly intimate focus on Emily in these early passages, dominated by breakdowns and consulting sessions. Yet even in intense closeups that enable Mara to vividly register Emily’s panic, fear and vaguely suicidal impulses, the direction has a certain cool-toned detachment that keeps the film from becoming a wholly subjective portrait of mental instability. That distanced quality persists even when Emily’s behavior, under the influence of Ablixa, takes a shocking turn for the worst.”

The rest of the review can be read at Variety

Side Effects will be out in theater on February 8th 2013. Check it out and experience this new film on the big screen.

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Charmaine Blake loves movies, musical theater listening to music and taking pictures of anything that she finds interesting. She is a voracious reader and writer, and enjoys her time writing for New Movie Launches. Charmaine loves spending time with her pets and currently has a Siberian Husky, a toy poodle and a cat.