SOURCE: Matthews, Peter. “Blind Date.” Sight and Sound 8, no. 10 (October 1998): 8–12.

In the following positive review, Matthews praises Soderbergh's film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Out of Sight.

It's commonly asserted that pulp fiction is more readily transmissible to the screen than literature. Almost by definition, a major work imposes its own way of seeing, and the adapter—forced to truncate and simplify—usually ends up with a prestige-laden stiff. The second-rate or downright trashy, by contrast, liberates the adapter to improvise freely on its themes and structure, without pangs of conscience that anything too sacred has been violated. But the case of crime novelist Elmore Leonard reminds us that the reverse can also be true: there are writers whose sensibility is so exquisitely minor that finding a screen equivalent is nearly impossible. Leonard ought to be a natural for the movies—his books, after all, consist of page...