Metacritic reviews

This is Steven Soderbergh at his best delivering a gripping, chilling and powerful movie experience that will have audiences talking (and freaking out).

If Contagion truly is the first leg of Soderbergh's retirement victory lap, this harrowing film is a potent reminder of what we stand to lose.

All are good, Damon in particular, but there are so many of them we don't see anyone for very long at one stretch. And all are given at least some bad material to work with before the movie is over. For the most part, they make the best of it.

One aspect of the film is befuddling. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) is a popular blogger with conspiracy theories about the government's ties with drug companies. His concerns are ominous but unfocused. Does he think drug companies encourage viruses? The blogger subplot doesn't interact clearly with the main story lines and functions mostly as an alarming but vague distraction.

The pressure cooker plot calls for intense performances all around but first among equals are Winslet and Ehle.

For a good hour, a very good first hour, the film efficiently accumulates small, terrifying incidents and images.

I found Contagion both flawed and fascinating, but it's not an entertainment.

There is little urgency to this spiraling disaster. Soderbergh has made a lot of noise this past year about quitting directing and taking up a less collaborative, more solitary pursuit - painting. This is an anti-social painter's movie. Millions are dying, but he doesn't care that much. So why should we?

Without fully rounded characters, it's hard to care who lives or dies in what amounts to an extended procedural on how disease prevention organizations might respond to such a scenario.

A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.