Total entertainment

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2000)

Julia Roberts's best film to date also features her finest performance, as well as great supporting work by Albert Finney, Marg Helgenberger, and Aaron Eckhardt, and a stalwart cast from top to bottom. Steven Soderbergh does a fantastic job of providing an audience-delighting comedy-drama that makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you whoop and holler. It's closer in spirit to "All the President's Men" than to the movie it's bound to be compared with, "Silkwood." This one isn't in "President"'s rarefied league, but it puts "Silkwood" in the shade, and Julia trumps Meryl handily by being not only fully up to the emotional demands of the part, but by being hilariously funny as well--and physically a dream. Finney hasn't been this good in years, and Eckhardt displays the kind of charismatic charm one couldn't have guessed he had from "In the Company of Men." This is a genuine winner and an instant super-classic!