Side Effects (2013)

Steven Soderbergh’s (apparent) final big-screen bow takes on big pharma and the need for Americans to dope up to get through the day, be it anti-depressants, anxiety pills, uppers, downers, or whatever. And what of the “Side Effects”? Limp libido? Exhaustion? Murderous sleep-walking fit? That’s the ticket here as a married couple (Channing Tatum and Rooney Mara) rocked by hubby’s prison stint for Wall Street sins are reunited only to see the wife slip off her plates after an apparent suicide attempt. Caught in the middle of all this, taking money from on high and prescribing pills to the low, is Jude Law as a psychiatrist, who begins Boy Scout and becomes … less so. I can’t give away anything more, because Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (both of “Contagion”) take a turn that hit me, well, like a drug at first -- euphoric love, but then a quick and lowly crash as I contemplated all that I saw. How not to spill the pills? Let me say this: The ugly ridiculous denouncement is Family Research Council approved. Pure 1950s. Got it? Mara is great. Tatum, ehh. Catherine Zeta-Jones plays another head shrink, and Pacinos the scenery. B- 

Arbitrage (2012)

Richard Gere is never bolder/better than when he plays an amoral cockup with sins to hide and a clock to beat. He is that and more in “Arbitage,” a timely thriller with Gere as a billionaire hedge fund manager who in one week sees a longtime financial fraud shell game crumble and accidentally kills his mistress in a crash, all while dodging police and his suspecting wife (Susan Sarandon). This is a 1 percenter who has been thieving and lying so long, the light of truth gets him sweating. But he knows the rigged system. That’s the twist in this ethics quagmire: We see-saw between wanting this pig nailed and wanting him to escape unharmed. Writer/director Nicholas Jarecki also takes an open shot at the real “takers” in this land –- not the poor or African-Americans or Hispanics as Fox News preaches, but the rich white Wall Street elite who own the banks. The scene where Gere’s CEO cluelessly asks a young black man who he has drawn into his scheme, “What’s an Applebee’s?” (The man wants to open a franchise), exemplifies modern American values. Money is all. A-