Steven Soderbergh

When a lethal airborne virus with the power to wipe out humanity is unleashed, the worldwide medical community races to find a vaccine and stop the panic from spreading. Starring Academy Award winners Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, and Academy Award nominees Jude Law and Laurence Fishburne, this edge-of-your-seat thriller follows the deadly path of a virus that is beyond containment. Researchers for disease control, the military, the World Health Organization and ordinary civilians mobilize to try and find a cure and the cause before it's too late.

George Clooney is one, Brad Pitt is two, Matt Damon three... well, let's just assume there are 13 collaborators in this installment of Steven Soderbergh's profitable caper franchise. We're back in Las Vegas for Ocean's Thirteen, where the boys plot to shut down the brand-new venture of a backstabbing hotelier (Al Pacino) because the guy double-crossed the now-ailing Reuben (Elliott Gould). If you look at the plot too closely, the entire edifice collapses (hey, how about those Chunnel-digging giant drills?), but Soderbergh conjures up a visual style that swings like Bobby Darin at the Copa.

Like its predecessor Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve is a piffle of a caper, a preposterous plot given juice and vitality by a combination of movie star glamour and the exuberant filmmaking skill of director Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, The Limey).

A high-ranking judge with a vendetta against drugs learns his own daughter is a cocaine addict - a San Diego housewife must suddenly take over her husband's drug dealing business when he is arrested - a Mexican police officer struggles to do the right thing in the midst of corruption. Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Benicio Del Toro star in Steven Soderbergh's amazing intertwined stories of the failing war on drugs.

George Clooney comes into his own as a leading man in the role of inveterate bank robber Jack Foley. Incarcerated, he uses another inmate's prison break as a cover for his own escape. Waiting for him, according to plan, is his partner, Buddy (Ving Rhames). Also waiting for him, not according to plan, is federal agent Karen Sisco (the ravishing Jennifer Lopez). She finds herself disarmed in more ways than one when she is deposited in the getaway car's trunk with Jack.

Ocean's Eleven improves on 1960's Rat Pack original with supernova casting, a slickly updated plot, and Steven Soderbergh's graceful touch behind the camera. Soderbergh reportedly relished the opportunity "to make a movie that has no desire except to give pleasure from beginning to end," and he succeeds on those terms, blessed by the casting of George Clooney as Danny Ocean, the title role originated by Frank Sinatra.