The Girlfriend Experience

Every year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are a couple of unexpected surprises and to coincide with the 20th Anniversary of Steven Soderbegh's Sex, Lies and Videotape premiering at the festival, there was a last-minute addition to the program billed merely as "An Evening with Steven Soderbergh." Word quickly got around that the filmmaker would be using the Eccles Theater's vast space to sneak preview his new movie The Girlfriend Experience to an audience for the first time.

After being introduced by the festival's director Geoff Gilmore, Soderbergh tried play the sneak preview cooly as if he hadn't planned on showing anything, but that ruse was quickly dropped to the delight of the packed theater. Before rolling the film, Soderbergh made it clear that the film was a work-in-progress, and one can expect changes before the movie gets its inevitable release later this year. Even so, the film, shot using the same Red digital camera technology Soderbergh used on his groundbreaking Latin American epic Che, looked absolutely amazing and was clearly a step up from his last film in the HDNet series, Bubble.

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