Studio

Focus Features

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Traffic

Steven Soderbergh · 2000

Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 crime drama Traffic traces the US drug trade across four interwoven storylines — political, enforcement, consumer, and supplier — using distinct colour grading, multilingual dialogue (including unsubtitled English and fully subtitled Spanish), and a procedural rhythm. Written by Stephen Gaghan and shot by Soderbergh under a pseudonym, it won four Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Benicio del Toro. Its ambition lies in structural coherence, not emotional resolution.

13:00

Happiness

Todd Solondz · 1998

Todd Solondz’s 1998 ensemble film follows three sisters and their circle across intersecting stories of loneliness, repression and violation. Shot by Maryse Alberti and scored by Robbie Kondor, it treats pedophilia, obscene phone calls, marital drift and suicidal despair with unblinking, tonally level observation. Its power lies in accumulation, not climax — in the weight of unspoken things, the silence after a confession, the banality of moral collapse. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and the National Board of Review’s Top Ten Films award, and was released unrated after surrendering its NC-17 classification.

13:00

Lust, Caution

Ang Lee · 2007

Ang Lee’s 2007 adaptation of Eileen Chang’s novella follows a Chinese student who infiltrates the inner circle of a collaborator in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Her mission blurs into intimacy, culminating in a choice that fractures loyalty, desire and selfhood. Shot by Rodrigo Prieto and scored by Alexandre Desplat, it is a slow, tactile study in moral erosion — less thriller than forensic portrait of how power reshapes the body and mind.