Directed by Stephen Soderbergh
Released in 1989
Written by Stephen Soderbergh
Cinematography by Walt Lloyd
Language: English
Isn't there something particularly joyful about the first encounter? I watched this as part of a "James Spader Sexual Triple Feature" for my long-running film group, a special event that I had curated. Asking my friends to watch a movie that I myself had not seen always feels like a little risk, like I might wind up presenting them with something unintentionally unnerving, a cat delivering a dead bird to your doorstep. It was a pleasure, then, to find that this film was so honest and yet tender in its portrayal of sexuality and desire. For myself, it's hard not to see something cautionary in the abstraction of Graham's videotapes, these mediations that fail to tell the immediate truth of sex. (April 18, 2026)