Traffic

Variety Todd McCarthy

Enormously ambitious and masterfully made, Traffic represents docudrama-style storytelling at a very high level.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A flat-out electrifying experience.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Borderline brilliant. Tackles the war on drugs from a kaleidoscope of perspectives.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The rare Hollywood epic that dares to entertain an audience by engaging the world.

Salon.com Jeff Stark

In the scorching new film Traffic, director Steven Soderbergh captures the hypocrisy -- and tragedy -- of the nation's unwinnable war on drugs. Traffic is a huge, determined movie in every way.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

There's not a smarter, more demanding American film from the past year.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

A stunning film.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Soderbergh's story, from a screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, cuts between these characters so smoothly that even a fairly complex scenario remains clear and charged with tension.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's a thriller that really thrills, a drama that really engages, a portrait of a world and system out of joint that is painfully convincing and totally engrossing from the first simmering minute to the last explosive second.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Explosive entertainment, with the tension and volatility of its subject matter.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

Traffic is a riveting, semi-documentary drama, and yet calling it that is a disservice to just how suspenseful and stylish an entertainment it is.

Newsweek David Ansen

Traffic doesn’t quite come to a full emotional boil at the end. Soderbergh is too knowing to offer easy solutions. But what a journey it takes us on: disturbing, exciting, completely absorbing.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Sinfully watchable ensemble movie.

Film.com Ernest Hardy

One of the things that makes Traffic so very good is the wry humor that's laced throughout the film. It's a funny movie.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

May be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville" to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid- washed palette.

Film.com Robert Horton

Movie excitement from beginning to end.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

His (Soderbergh's) work has taken on echoes of a classier, bygone age of cinema, at once more literate and lighthearted.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Traffic is not just an ultra-procedural--it's the Big Picture, the Whole Enchilada, complete with a complicated war between two Mexican drug cartels.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It's a thrilling, powerful movie, and one that certain people in certain quarters may have at one time called dangerous. Some of them may yet still.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

It's every bit as thrilling and engrossing as the best spy thriller or cop flick.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

He's (Soderbergh) among the few directors working today who makes me wonder what he'll do next - and draws me into the movie house, whatever it may be.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Atriumph on almost every level. It is breathtakingly stylish, wonderfully acted and its three interrelated tales of the "war" on drugs are brilliantly structured to form a cohesive, powerful whole.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

It's the best drug-busting movie since ''The French Connection.''

USA Today Mike Clark

The story itself is surprisingly seamless, yet it's the individual components that linger.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Where Traffic stumbles is in its inability to engage the heart with the same fervor it engages the intellect.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The picture's thoughtfulness and ambition make it unusually suspenseful, gripping, and disturbing.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Though meticulously researched, well acted and filled with striking moments, the movie ultimately feels oddly disconnected.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

So though it takes important steps in that direction, the film pulls back from what seems to be its own logical conclusion.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

As with much of Soderbergh's avant-garde work, his garde isn't quite as avant as he would have us believe it is. Still, Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.

TNT RoughCut Andy Klein

It’s Del Toro who really gets to strut his stuff with a subtle, ambiguous, and riveting performance. In a field of top-notch actors, he’s the one whom you remember days later.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

I don't see this slightly better-than-average drug thriller, with slightly better-than-average direction by Steven Soderbergh, as anything more than a routine rubber-stamping of genre reflexes.

Time Richard Schickel

Finally, though, Traffic, for all its earnestness, does not work. It leaves one feeling restless and dissatisfied.

Slate David Edelstein

You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.