Emily, a woman with a history of mental illness (Rooney Mara) nervously welcomes her husband (Channing Tatum) home after his release from prison. Her anxiety about their future grows until she impulsively drives her car into the wall of a parking garage. The hospital assigns a young psychologist called Banks (Jude Law) to assess her fitness for release. He agrees to let her go home after she claims that she just had a bad moment, that she has had therapy before and is willing to do it again. She becomes his patient and reports that her former therapist (Catherine Zeta-Jones) had successfully treated her with antidepressant medications.
The usual meds don’t seem to be working and the young couple are willing to try something new, so Banks gives her a prescription called Ablixa that seems to work, albeit with side effects, one of which is sleepwalking. Suddenly Emily does something terrible, and all eyes turn to Banks: was his prescription correct? Did he have an improper relationship with Emily or other patients? He loses consulting work and his colleagues, and it seems that he will be collateral damage of Emily’s illness; until an offhand remark from a stranger pulls him up short and leads him to wonder whether things are in fact as they seem.
“It’s the culture,” shrugs Tatum after a colleague apologizes for not being more supportive after his indictment on insider trading. That remark is implicit throughout the movie, as we see a Hitchcock-style plot unspool along contemporary lines, examining the American cultural touchstones of mental illness, antidepressants, white collar crime and more. In many ways director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns have crafted a modern version of the French classic Diabolique.
I hear that Soderbergh has announced that this will be his last feature film, which would be quite a shame. I was initially turned off by his indie debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape; but over the years I have come to enjoy and respect his work, especially The Limey, Traffic, and Solaris; Haywire, his take on Jason Bourne-style films, was my favourite movie of 2012 (I haven’t seen his other 2012 film, Magic Mike, yet). Soderbergh shows a masterful command of all the elements of filmmaking, and while Side Effects is not his best picture, it is very good and likely the best thing you could see at the theatre right now.
Ralph Fiennes makes his directing debut and stars in this sort-of-modernized adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known histories, about a Roman general who is not shy about getting into the thick of battle to repel the invading force of a rebellious province. When supporters in the Senate propose to give him the political office of Consul, rivals use the power of public opinion to have him banished instead, where he joins the rebels he recently fought and threatens to take revenge on Rome. 
Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, and Philip Seymour Hoffman star in this adaptation of a play about a Governor in the home stretch of a Democratic nomination campaign; Clooney also directed and co-wrote the screenplay. Gosling plays Steve, the up-and-coming strategist helping his mentor Paul (Hoffman) get the handsome liberal Governor Mike Morris (Clooney) elected. Steve is successfully tempted to spend the night with a campaign intern (Evan Rachel Wood) and unsuccessfully tempted to jump to a rival’s campaign by another strategist (Paul Giamatti), both of which lead to complications that threaten to ruin his own reputation and the Governor’s campaign. 
