SOURCE: Wilmington, Michael. “King of the Hill: A Wonderful Film of Terrible Times.” Los Angeles Times (20 August 1993): 4.

In the following review, Wilmington praises Soderbergh's King of the Hill as “one of the finest American films of the year.”

Aaron Kurlander, the boy protagonist of Steven Soderbergh's heart-stirring new movie, King of the Hill, is the plucky, all-around kid many of us would like to have been: precocious writer, academic star, dead-eye marble champ, devoted son and brother, dauntless neighborhood explorer. He's a mensch of 12, king of his shining little hill.

As Soderbergh brilliantly re-creates Aaron's world—the events of writer A. E. Hotchner's autobiographical 1972 novel—we see everything more clearly. His hotel, the Avalon, is a deteriorating fleabag in 1933 St. Louis, taken over by the bank and slowly being converted into a bordello with dance hall annex. As tenants fall in arrears, they're locked out by a sadistic...