Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Steven Soderbergh
Stars: James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher
Runtime: 100 minutes

Plot: A sexually repressed woman's husband is having an affair with her sister. The arrival of a visitor with a rather unusual fetish changes everything.

Review: Steven Soderbergh kickstarted the independent film movement with this landmark drama about the tangled relationships among four people and a video camera. John (Peter Gallagher) is an unscrupulous, self-centered lawyer with a beautiful wife named Ann (Andie MacDowell). Ann feels secure and well provided-for in their relationship, but she has almost no interest in sex; she tells her therapist that she's more concerned about waste disposal. John, however, is still quite interested in sex and is having an affair with Ann's sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), whose personality is fire to Ann's ice; sex is the one area in which she's been able to best her more successful sister, and she delights in her ability to seduce Ann's husband. Into this dysfunctional picture comes Graham (James Spader), a college friend of John's whom he hasn't seen in nine years. Graham has decided that talking about sex is more interesting than actually doing it, so he meets women and asks them discuss their desires and fantasies as he tapes them with a camcorder. 
An unusually mature and self-assured fiction-feature debut for director Steven Soderbergh, SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE was the winner of the Cannes Film Festival's top prize, and the Palme d'Or. Despite what many may think, this is a quiet film, relying on talk rather than scenes of sex or nudity to make its points, and in the process establishing a far more intimate tone than many more explicit pictures. 
Together with Quentin Tarantino's very different Pulp Fiction (1994), SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE was one of the most influential movies for independent filmmaking of the 1990s
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Reviewed by S.M. Intisab Shahriyar