It’s been a big year for Benicio del Toro. In 2025, he reunited with two high-profile directors: Wes Anderson, to star in The Phoenician Scheme, and Paul Thomas Anderson for a supporting role in One Battle After Another. Both movies have been major events for film lovers, but there’s another recent team-up between del Toro and a regular collaborator that got much less attention. Released on streaming just as movie theaters were starting to reopen, No Sudden Move got lost in the home/theatrical gap. Luckily, it’s still hanging out on HBO Max, waiting to be rediscovered as part of Steven Soderbergh’s post-retirement hot streak.
Both Andersons take advantage of del Toro’s laconic magnetism in their 2025 movies, often using him to deadpan-comic effect while still effectively building out a character from his minimalist style. In The Phoenician Scheme, he plays a wealthy, amoral businessman traveling around the Middle East in a mad dash to complete a self-serving infrastructure project. One Battle After Another casts him as a martial arts instructor and community leader with ties to a disbanded revolutionary group.
Neither film portrays 2025 reality as we know it; The Phoenician Scheme is set over half a century ago, and the present-day setting of One Battle After Another nonetheless avoids mentioning any real politicians or other major public figures by name. Yet they both use familiar and pleasurable frameworks of capers and action-thriller stand-offs to engage with plenty of current concerns — like rebelling against white supremacy (in One Battle After Another) and the rapaciousness of capitalism (in Phoenician Scheme).
Initially, No Sudden Move doesn’t come on as strongly in that regard. It’s set in 1950s Detroit, and imitates the hard-boiled style of that era’s knottier noirs, when the genre was no longer so frequently consigned to 80-minute features and double bills (but before it fell out of favor as the decade went on). Criminals Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle, another Soderbergh alum) and Ronald Russo (del Toro) are in a classic noir set-up: strangers are hired to do what seems like a simple job for a suspiciously generous sum of money. While gangster Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) sends Charley (Kieren Culkin) to escort accountant Matt Wertz (David Harbour) to his office to retrieve some important paperwork, Curt and Ronald are recruited to stay with Wertz’s family and ensure his compliance. But when Charley appears ready to execute everyone in the house, Curt and Ronald stop him, and realize they’ve been set up. They spend the rest of the movie attempting to untangle the situation, avoid the cops, negotiate with various criminals, and escape with their lives.
The screenplay by Ed Solomon can get a little convoluted, but it’s smoothed over by a packed ensemble and Soderbergh’s exacting style. The director makes unusual use of fisheye lenses to distort the edges of the frame. Scenes with multiple characters, like a tense sit-down featuring Cheadle, del Toro, Fraser, and Liotta (nicely split between the calm of the first two and the sputtering rage of the second two), make them look subtly squeezed together, while shots that track a single character’s movement across the screen distort the landscape.
Nothing feels quite normal, a way of achieving a subjective and dreamlike effect without shooting in the more noir-typical black-and-white. The lack of the latter also means Soderbergh can make expressive use of color, with splashes of red or sickly yellow sticking out from the deep-black shadows.
Del Toro does particularly fine, subtle work from these shadows. He’s often been a quiet, enigmatic presence, something both of his 2025 movies take advantage of, but in retrospect, his work in No Sudden Move feels like a reset after a few years where he mostly appeared in sequels, whether to a signature movie like Sicario or in someone else’s franchise like The Last Jedi. What better way to kick off a set of inventive variations on crime movies than with an old-fashioned noir thriller where much of his acting happens on his face?
Though No Sudden Move has a lot of ins, outs, and supporting characters, it’s not as sprawling as Traffic, the previous Soderbergh thriller to feature both of these actors (and for which del Toro won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The leanness of Soderbergh’s more experimental period is in effect here, even if this one runs longer than his customary 95 minutes or so. But Soderbergh does circle back to another later-period trademark of his, placing No Sudden Move in line with movies like Logan Lucky, Unsane, and Kimi — as well as del Toro’s more recent work with the Andersons — as a thriller explicitly set in a world ravaged by capitalism.
So when the filmmakers reveal their MacGuffin, it’s something pointedly corporate and removed from the usual noir world of score-settling, bags of cash, and payments for illicit services. Those elements are all present and accounted for, but what the bad guys are actually after connects to the larger world beyond shady criminals. The movie doesn’t become didactic; it just offers a crime-boss figure who’s not officially a gangster at all. He simply behaves like one to avoid government regulations.
The corporate figure at the top of a conspiracy isn’t exactly a fresh idea; the difference is how casual Soderbergh is about it. These are the working conditions, just as they are for the characters in The Phoenician Scheme and One Battle After Another. Curt and Ronald never become corporation-busting heroes. They’re forced to do what almost everyone else does: try to protect themselves and hope to make it out alive.
