sex, lies, and videotape · reception & legacy
1989 · Steven Soderbergh
How sex, lies, and videotape has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It arrived as a thunderclap — Palme d'Or at 26, Sundance sensation, the little $1.2M film that outgrossed studio pictures — and is now remembered less as a movie than as the big bang of the '90s American indie boom. Soderbergh himself has been famously shruggy about it, which only fuels the periodic 'actually, it still holds up' rediscoveries.
What's debated
The eternal debate: is it a genuinely great film or just a historically important one — and, hanging over everything, the fact that it beat Do the Right Thing at Cannes 1989, which many cinephiles still call one of the all-time jury robberies.
Its footprint
Its lowercase title became a headline-writer's template — '___, lies, and ___' has been riffed on thousands of times — and the film itself is shorthand for the moment Miramax, Sundance, and 'indie film' became a cultural force. Soderbergh's Cannes acceptance line, 'I guess it's all downhill from here,' is one of the most quoted in festival history.
Where it stands
A load-bearing pillar of the indie canon — the 'you must see where it all started' pick — though on Letterboxd it now reads more as homework-turned-pleasant-surprise than beloved favourite.