Muriel Award: Best Body of Work
Steven Soderbergh (director, The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant!) [123 points/18 votes]
“Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaking machine, but he’s not just churning out hackwork. With every film he shifts gears and challenges himself. Soon after breaking the mold of the epic biography with the ambitious and difficult Che (which he wrote, produced, photographed and directed), Soderbergh segued smoothly to the intimate The Girlfriend Experience. Shooting quickly with a microbudget, he somehow managed to evince a strong female performance from a porn star and deliver the kind of personal, experimental film you’d expect from a young man trying to make a splash at Sundance. Other established filmmakers talk about going back to making smaller, more personal films. Soderbergh just does it without making a big deal about it. Then he follows up Girlfriend with the more mainstream (on the surface) The Informant! which kind of turns the muckraker on its head and, like Che, willfully avoids the easy formula of its genre. Critics were divided over all three films and audiences were indifferent, but even if you’re not enamored of the work you have to admire the vibrancy and variety of it. That it all came from one man is a marvel.” - Craig Kennedy
Runners-up:
George Clooney [112/18]
Michael Fassbender [84/12]
James Gandolfini [66/10]
Woody Harrelson [36/5]
