Let's take the second first, so to speak: it's not true. Okay, so Soderbergh's later work earned the rump-end of the critics and commercially more or less dropped off of the scale, but to take either or both as evidence of a lack of quality is to miss the boat. The witty, stylish and brickbat-guaranteed Kafka was admittedly an odd choice for a second picture, but King of The Hill is a charming and effective period piece, and the critically overlooked and virtually unseen The Underneath is a very distinctive neo-noir. Throw in his Spalding Gray monologue Gray's Anatomy and you may have a wilfully perverse, unconsciously eclectic canon, but negligible?

And that bit about good books, bad movies? That is true. There are honourable exceptions - Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, Cronenberg's Crash - but they are very much exceptions. And that, you'll be pleased to know, brings us to this, Soderbergh's attempt to shoot Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight, and the necessary proof of our axiom: second-rate literature can film beautifully. Because Out of Sight is surely the weakest Leonard (pseudo-western Cuba Libre excepted), since finding his second wind in the mid-80s. It's perfunctory stuff, the characterisation lame and his usually riotous dialogue insipid. There's even a rather affected scene where the two leads - career crim Jack Foley and sexy federal marshal Karen Sisco - are locked in the trunk of a car that is pure bad Tarantino.

As filmed, the scene also finds Soderbergh at his weakest. It's integral to the bond between George Clooney's Foley and Jennifer Lopez as Karen, but given the rest of the picture is as generous as it is, is easily forgiven. It offers Clooney his only real grandstanding shot in the entire picture too, but forget about that and he's a revelation, all but eradicating memories of the grisly Batman & Robin. Playing it small, he melts into an astonishing cast that finds the likes of Ving Rhames, Don Cheedle, Albert Brooks, Catherine Keener and Dennis Farina at the top of their game. Cheedle and Rhames are all but worth the price of admission alone.

Unusually too for these TV obsessed days, the picture is never less than arresting, the hot pastels of Miami (very deliberately not cartoonish neon pinks and greens), cutting abruptly to a wintry Detroit's gunmetal blues. It's a picture of two halves, both in look and tone, with its northern scenes far harder, more wince-making violent than before. Which is why, more than anything, this marks a new peak in filmed Leonard. Like Tarantino's surprisingly mature Jackie Brown, Scott Frank's screenplay is open to Leonard's ebb and flow, understanding that character is at a premium. The plot - Karen and Foley fall for one another while she hunts him down and he does criminal stuff - is merely a spine, the structure cut with a series of ingeniously stationed flashbacks.

It's Soderbergh's picture to the end, and he sees it through with a warmth often dismissed from his other projects - and that almost despite the barrage of visual tricks at his disposal. Artful zooms, jump-cuts and freeze-frames are heartily but judiciously employed, the film as rich to look at as it is to listen too. Its tour de force, the big sex scene, steals brilliantly from Roeg's Don't Look Now.

Hip but never flip, Out of Sight is finally revealed as a better film than Jackie Brown because Soderbergh has a more finely developed sense of economy. It's not short (what is these days), but it gets in, gets the job done and gets gone before outstaying its welcome, and, unlike the Tarantino's big set-piece, never wears its smarts on its sleeve. Don't let it's relative failure at the American box-office or the criminal lack of Oscar nods fool you, this is the sort of big studio class act that only comes along once in a blue moon.