Contagion Movie Reviews

Director-Steven Soderbergh Star Cast-Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lawrence Fishburne, Jude Law

Contagion Average Rating: 3.1/5

Showing 6 Reviews 

List of  Contagion Movie Reviews

Review by:Rajeev Masand  Site:IBNLive Ratings:3.5/5

Contagion is a horror movie where the fear is palpable, and Soderbergh treats it with the pace of a thriller. Even as the virus travels from person to person, city to city, health officials race to find a vaccine, while also trying to control the flow of information, lest the public panic. Pretty soon entire cities are being quarantined, banks and offices are raided, and there’s rioting in food queues.Soderbegh, whose flair for sustaining multiple storylines earned him an Oscar for Traffic, employs a similar narrative to tell this freakishly frightening story of great urgency. In the film’s final and possibly most chilling scene, the director shows us how the virus might actually have started.I’m going with three and a half out of five for Contagion. Prepare to be rattled by this brilliant, brutal film.Read more

  Review by:Nikhat Kazmi Site:TimesOfIndia Ratings:3.5/5

Contagion is topical, slick, fast-paced and embellished with a stellar ensemble cast that keeps you engrossed in the drama, despite the fact that most of them don't take much of screen time.The high point of Soderbergh's film is its tone: never sensationalist, always restrained and therefore credible. With the world grappling with sundry new epidemics -- SARS, Mad Cow Disease, Swine Flu -- Contagion has an expediency to it which makes it eminently watchable. Doesn't seem too far-fetched, this threat of a new and deadly disease that originates from a bat and a pig and spreads through something as unavoidable as human touch. Time to be scared. Really scared. Read more

  Review by:Shalini Langer Site:IndianExpress Ratings:3/5

Just when you are settling down to see a movie about an outbreak as you haven't seen before -- and there have been some -- by a director who knows how to get up close and underneath the skin, Contagion develops into a sort-of thriller without an emotional centre.More than scared, you leave awed -- not about all that you watch but never see around you, but about those microscopic beings and how they move worlds. Not necessarily your world.. Read more

  Review by:Rachit Gupta Site:Filmfare Ratings:5/5

The story is pretty simple though. There’s an outbreak of an unknown virus and it kills the infected within 48 hours or so. As much as this seems like an apocalyptic story where usually the infected mutate into the undead (zombies for the uninitiated) it never quite happens. Half way through the film you give up any hope of rotting corpses walking amok and exclaim, OMG! This is really ‘real’. there’s really no villain here, no fighting, no heroes. Just waiting for someone to come up with a vaccine, as would happen in the real world. You can’t hate it but you can’t love it either. This is anticlimax in its brightest glory. And definitely not an easy pill to swallow. Read more

Review by:Rashid Irani Site:HindustanTimes Ratings:3/5

Everything about this cautionary tale is chosen with care from the international locations to the top-draw cast. Depicting events with an almost documentary-like feel, director Soderbergh (Traffic) effectively conveys the mounting sense of dread along with the attendant collapse of the social order.The narrative takes a turn for the clichéd as it trundles along to an anti-climactic revelation.Although Contagion doesn’t measure up to the high standards set by Steven Soderbergh, it’s certainly a cut or two above the current crop of doomsday fantasies..Read more

  Review by:Mrigank Dhaniwala Site:Koimoi Ratings:1/5

What’s Good: The paranoia that the narrative creates in the viewers’ minds; the performances; the pulsating background score; Steven Soderbergh’s realistic direction.What’s Bad: The docu-drama type of screenplay; the lack of emotional scenes; the absence of a connect between the characters on the one hand and also between the audience and the characters on the other hand; the slow pace of the narrative that induces tedium.Verdict: Contagion makes for a very different kind of a thriller which will appeal only to the discerning city audiences in India.Read more