The Girlfriend Experience Critic Reviews

This film is true about human nature. It is not universal, but within its particular focus, it is unrelenting.Read the full review

The smartest thing director Steven Soderbergh did in the making of The Girlfriend Experience was to cast Sasha Grey.Read the full review

The Girlfriend Experience is one of Steven Soderbergh's bite-size, semi-improvised, shot-on-DV doodles (like Bubble or Full Frontal), and it's the best one he's made.Read the full review

Fair warning: I had to see The Girlfriend Experience twice before its pieces settled into coherent shape.Read the full review

The thinking behind Grey's casting, with its obvious sex-industry connections, lends the film a degree of verisimilitude, but it really pays off in a cameo by film critic Glenn Kenny, who brings a hilariously sleazy theatricality to the role of an "escort critic" who expects graft for his reviews.Read the full review

Stylishly shot on the high-def cheap, runs 77 potently sexless minutes. Its subject isn't erotica, it's commodities trading.Read the full review

Voyeurism is a favorite pursuit of Americans, and The Girlfriend Experience works in large part because it indulges that pastime. The fascination with the film is that it offers an arm's-length opportunity to peer through a peephole into a lifestyle that will be exotic and alluring to most in the audience.Read the full review

When the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.Read the full review

The film manages a career-spanning panache: Soderbergh taps into the nervy impulses of his earliest endeavor, "sex, lies and videotape" as well as "Ocean's Eleven." The Girlfriend Experience has something to elevate and exasperate fans of both.Read the full review