Clooney was already locked in to play the charming financial institution robber Jack Foley. Jennifer Lopez, recent off the back-to-back hits of “Selena” and “Anaconda,” reportedly beat out Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts and Mira Sorvino for the position of Karen Sisco, the federal marshal who apprehends Foley throughout a jailbreak and finds herself inconveniently interested in him. (Soderbergh would direct Roberts to an Oscar two years later in “Erin Brockovich,” and forged her reverse Clooney, the first of several onscreen team-ups, in “Ocean’s Eleven.”) Soderbergh stuffed out the forged with a rogues’ gallery of ace character actors, together with Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, Viola Davis, Dennis Farina, Luis Guzman, Catherine Keener, Ving Rhames and (in unbilled cameos) the “Jackie Brown” co-stars Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton.

Reviews had been ecstatic. “Variety” called it a “reflexively witty crime caper.” The Times’s Janet Maslin wrote, “As directed with terrific panache by Steven Soderbergh, these two sultry stars take an intricate Elmore Leonard crime tale and give it steam heat.” Anthony Lane of The New Yorker proclaimed, “Soderbergh has done Elmore Leonard proud,” and the journal devoted a playful sidebar to the Zippo lighter so essential to the motion.

But audiences didn’t present up, and the $37 million home gross didn’t even cowl the movie’s $48 million price range. However, “Out of Sight” proved Clooney and Lopez may carry an image with grace and pizazz, and it was the comeback car Soderbergh wanted — by 2001, he was competing in opposition to himself for finest director on the Academy Awards, double-nominated for “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic.” He received for the latter; its ingeniously placing cinematography, utilizing deeply saturated and distinctive colour schemes to make clear its narratives, started as an experiment to separate the timelines and places of “Out of Sight.” The image’s use of freeze frames, displaced dialogue and narrative loop-the-loops would additional level the best way towards the experimentation of his movies to return.

In his assessment, Roger Ebert called it “the first film to build on the enormously influential ‘Pulp Fiction’ instead of simply mimicking it. It has the games with time, the lowlife dialogue, the absurd violent situations, but it also has its own texture.” That texture — of intelligence and wit and playfulness — was the Soderbergh contact, which got here to outline his work within the new century. “‘People don’t have to pick one or the other,” he contended in 1998. “You can have a film like ‘Out of Sight’ that operates well on a mass-entertainment level and also has quirky, interesting cinematic elements.” That felt like a novelty in 1998; in 2023, it appears like a miracle.