SOURCE: Kauffmann, Stanley. “Three in One.” New Republic (22 January 2001): 22–23.

In the following review, Kauffmann offers a generally positive assessment of Traffic.

Steven Soderbergh prospers, and his prospering is a chapter in recent cultural history. He made his debut in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape, a small-scale film unique in its intelligent candor and self-confident rhythm. Two years later he presented the disappointing Kafka, not a bankrupt work but one in which Soderbergh was struggling to keep up payments on his residence in art. The same was true of his next picture, King of the Hill. His next four pictures, again not completely barren, were attempts to maintain membership in the slightly lower YDOP Club. (Young Directors of Promise.) Then he saw the light—one kind of empowering light. In 1998 he made Out of Sight, an action comedy-romance, flying with exuberant skill and with zero ambition toward gravity. What...