Avis Metacritic

Enormously ambitious and masterfully made, Traffic represents docudrama-style storytelling at a very high level.

It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.

His (Soderbergh's) work has taken on echoes of a classier, bygone age of cinema, at once more literate and lighthearted.

Traffic is not just an ultra-procedural--it's the Big Picture, the Whole Enchilada, complete with a complicated war between two Mexican drug cartels.

It's every bit as thrilling and engrossing as the best spy thriller or cop flick.

He's (Soderbergh) among the few directors working today who makes me wonder what he'll do next - and draws me into the movie house, whatever it may be.

The picture's thoughtfulness and ambition make it unusually suspenseful, gripping, and disturbing.

Where Traffic stumbles is in its inability to engage the heart with the same fervor it engages the intellect.

Though meticulously researched, well acted and filled with striking moments, the movie ultimately feels oddly disconnected.

You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.