In a culture soaked with theatrical emotionality, and mostly in thrall to a utopian view of history and human nature, there is something oddly relieving, even cathartic, in the jaded and the hard-boiled. Surrounded by the language of therapy and self-actualization, what really feels therapeutic, after a long day laboring in the salt mines, is to dip into a novel or film whose worldview is completely scrubbed of sentimentality — to take a long hot bath in a film noir or policier that describes the world as it is, and not as we wish it were. I think of my thrill when I read the first sentence of prosecutor-turned-writer George V. Higgins’s 1970 crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which became an equally iconic film: “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.”

The filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, known for his stylish and witty crime films, understands this need for occasional, cleansing grit. He also understands that it need not be devoid of comedy, irony, or the absurd.