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Displaying a transparency that few filmmakers of his fame and / or caliber would even bother with, Steven Soderbergh has, for a couple of years, been keen on releasing lists of what he watched and read during the previous twelve months. If you’re at all interested in this sort of thing — and why not? what else are you even doing with your day? — the 2015 selection should be of strong interest, this being a time when he was fully enmeshed in the world of creating television.

He’s clearly observing the medium with a close eye, be it what’s on air or what his friends (specifically David Fincher and his stillborn projects) show him, and how that might relate to his apparent love of 48 Hours Mystery or approach to a comparatively light slate of cinematic assignments — specifically: it seems odd that the last time he watched Magic Mike Xxl, a...

★★★★☆ Thought Crimes (2015) will be remembered over the next few years for sparking grand scale debate on where one's right to freedom and privacy ends online, and where the need for law enforcement intervention and criminal prosecution begins. Directed by Erin Lee Carr, the documentary does an outstanding job of remaining as objective with the case as possible. The story follows ex-nypd officer Gilberto Valle, more commonly known to the general public as New York City's, 'Cannibal Cop'. Valle, a seemingly conventional lifetime resident of the Queens borough, had his entire life changed when his wife discovered thousands of text based conversations between him and various strangers.

As someone who’s still getting over HBO’s The Jinx, I don’t know what I was expecting from the network’s latest documentary, rather tellingly titled Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop, but rest assured that if you’re falling asleep too easily at night, here’s a very viable solution. I left the film deeply unsettled, and like the dark ideas that rattled around subject Gilberto Valle’s head and brought prosecutors as well as a media firestorm to his doorstep, I have a feeling Thought Crimes won’t be leaving me anytime soon.

As directed by Erin Lee Carr, this latest attempt to crack a sensational case wide open and examine every gory detail is both a thorough presentation of Valle’s ordeal and a thought-provoking (if less rigorous) rumination on the nature of privacy in the modern surveillance state. Gilberto’s then-wife,...