Contagion works as a movie because it feels more than plausible; it feels inevitable. Modern society simply presents too great a window of opportunity for an enterprising virus to catapult around the world faster than we can map it, track it, and immunize against it. That one hasn’t yet is just probabilities.

There have been many plagues throughout history, and science has done its best to minimize the damage. As our science improves, so do the viruses. They, after all, are also fighting to survive and evolve. This thriller, directed by the prodigious Steven Soderbergh, chronicles the emergence of a frighteningly-successful new flu and humanity’s response as days turn to months and a handful of casualties becomes millions. Early on, a scientist identifies it as essentially the offspring of a chance meeting between a sick bat and a sick pig – no terrorist weapon, no evil plot, just virus kismet.

We open on Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a woman in an airport bar named Beth Emhoff, who is coughing. Beth claims to be jet-lagged. Below her, a caption appears, reading “Day 2”. That’s a nice nudge from Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum). Emhoff is returning from an overseas business trip to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) in Minnesota, and I don’t ruin anything you won’t see in the very early minutes of the movie to say that she will not prove immune to what will become known as the MEV-1 virus.

There’s nothing bizarre about what MEV-1 does – the symptoms are as ordinary as the holiday sniffles. It is the speed, the ease of spreading, and its lethality that are a step beyond earlier cousins; the rest is mercilessly banal, as Beth Emhoff goes into a seizure and flops her life away on the dull kitchen floor. Soderbergh lingers on it, like watching a fish at the bottom of a boat.

For much of the time, Contagion is like this, observing its cataclysm in too-clinical a manner to produce any response in the audience other than dread or cringing. It is just so remorselessly accurate – a thriller built not on superhuman stunts and ticking-clock deadlines but on implacable logistics and the chaotic noise of human error. Death enters inside the most ordinary and unthinking behavior; one very bright, very useful character played by an Oscar-winning movie star is struck down by hotel room service. After the final action we see in their life – good-hearted but pitiful and futile – they are not borne from the stage like sweet prince Hamlet, but taped up in plastic and tossed in a ditch.

Providing much of what emotion the movie can is Damon, typically earnest and excellent as a father who has lost so much and is trying to protect the daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) he still has and not drive her away in doing so. And there is one marvelous scene that bursts with feeling, in which, at a pivotal moment in the quest for a vaccine, a woman shows her courage to the man who taught it to her.

But the rest is a brisk world tour with the key players. Centers for Disease Control director Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to navigate bureaucracy, manage risk, and balance how much to tell a frightened public when he knows the cost of giving credibility to things half-understood. His associate, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), packs a bag for Minnesota to urgently track Beth’s recent movements and contacts – as one of the earliest victims, they are trying to discover ground zero by rewinding her final days. This drags out information which complicates Mitch’s grief. A World Health Organization doctor played by Marion Cotillard reviews security footage at an Asian casino – watching the now-dead interact and attempting to logic together, at each brush of contact, who was passer and passee.

And tromping around San Francisco with self-satisfied zeal is an anti-PHARMA blogger named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who has a few things right and a few things wrong, but pastes it all together with strident assumptions about greed and collusion. This leads to a brief but fascinating little scene wherein a hedge fund representative (Randy Lowell), without even a nod or a wink, installs in Krumwiede the idea that his zeal can be profitable – much like how those talk radio hosts always preaching economic apocalypse segue seamlessly into commercials entreating you to buy gold.

It’s a parallel that enhances Contgation, demonstrating how a false belief can mutate, propagate through a population and, really, resist cure just like a virus; as a dense web of additional beliefs build atop the foundation of that first false one. People who let it past their defenses, in essence, quarantine themselves with their conspiracies away from the rest of humanity. At one point, shown lab results which contradict one of his earliest claims, Krumwiede is compelled to retort: “Well, of course YOUR lab would say that!” To allow for any other possibility would cost him too much.

The production, aided in every frame by Oscar-winning editor Stephen Mirrione, covers a broad ensemble and locations on three or four continents, on a budget that’s about a third of what gets tossed at your run-of-the-mill superhero movie these days. It’s a change-of-pace in terms of subject matter for Soderbergh, but a good match for his steady gaze and gift for broad-but-naturalistic color palettes. It is solid in all respects without being great; he has traded away the chance for epiphany or insight, and abandoned many opportunities for pathos, in exchange for relentless momentum. Cineaste that he is, he knows he is ultimately making a scary disease movie, and wants to make it as scary and disease-y as his equal desire not to insult our intelligence allows.

We see death, and panic, and looting, the true fragility of our social compact and the insidious way ordinary human contact can be made frightening. It is not gratuitously gruesome, although the filmmakers are not even done with pretty Gwyneth Paltrow after they’ve snuffed her. It’s not really about blood, it’s about sparing us the Hollywood world where nothing bad can happen to you if you are famous enough. One main character breaks a rule because his heart compels him to, like it would in any movie; only here the world doesn’t celebrate his act but sets him up for ruin – and you can understand their anger. That’s how I’d feel if I saw the empowered playing favorites while my neighbors were dying in their kitchens. But, as Contagion effectively reminds me, I would only be truly surprised if someone in his position acted any other way.

The Bourne Supremacy
Director: Paul Greengrass
Writer: Tony Gilroy, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
Producers: Frank Marshall, Patrick Crowley, Paul Sandberg
Stars: Matt Damon, Brian Cox, Joan Allen, Franka Potente, Julia Stiles, Karl Urban

One of the many things that works about The Bourne Supremacy is that not all of the bad guys act like bad guys, and not all of the red herring bad guys act like bad guys for the sake of cheap trickery, either. There is a conspiracy afoot, and on one side is a shifty Russian oil tycoon (Martin Csokas) and his permanently scowling enforcer (Karl Urban). But they’re working with somebody, and for once it is not immediately apparent whom, since the rest of the characters are behaving believably like professionals would considering the fairly extraordinary circumstances in which they find themselves.

It was a distinctive aspect of its predecessor, The Bourne Identity that even secondary roles were filled with talented, memorable actors, and it serves this movie well now too. The quality referred to in the previous paragraph is one of the side effects of this wise decision, and the end result is a fine sequel in a summer that has also blessed us with Shrek 2 and Spiderman 2.

Of course, none of it would work without the right actor at the center. Jason Bourne, a CIA-trained killing machine who discovered a conscience when he lost his memory, is a fairly preposterous character any way you slice it. Matt Damon’s blessing on the franchise is his ability to embrace the role, and lend it seriousness and pathos even as he’s socking it to people. He plays the emotions – the confusion, the perpetual need to improvise in the moment. The physical abilities he wears as unobtrusively as his clothing; unlike James Bond, Jason Bourne would never be caught showing off.

Even after two years, his brain is scrambled enough that when CIA agent Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) accuses him of murdering two people in Berlin, it gives him pause as he considers that she might be right. Or even more confusingly, she might be both wrong and right at the same time.

As we open he’s still having fragmentary nightmares of his old life, and wants only to piece them together so he can face his past sins and overcome them. It goes without saying this puts a crimp in his beachfront romance with Marie (Franka Potente), who has been bouncing around the globe with him since he saved her life, showing faith that he’s more than the perfect assassin he was trained to be.

But then, a bomb goes off in Germany, killing an undercover agent, and a man who’s outfit and car are “all wrong” starts shadowing Bourne in India. His Spidey-senses tingling, he goes on the run again, convinced that the CIA is still trying to rub him out for leaving the fold.

He doesn’t know that the black bag “Treadstone” program he worked for was shut down by its boss, Abbott (Brian Cox), and that he’s one of the only two operatives left alive. When he kidnaps and interrogates the other (Tomas Arana) in Munich, their conversation is cordial and casual, two ex-office-mates talking shop. At least until they have to fight to the death.

The action lives up to the standard set by its predecessor – not only does director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday) provide a car chase through streets and tunnels in Moscow that drew applause in the showing I attended, but Bourne’s fisticuffs have lost none of their trademark snap.

If only they were a little easier to discern – the chief complaint to level against the movie is an overabundance of handheld camera work, which lends intensity and immediacy to scenes of conspiring and conversation, but makes it hard to tell who’s doing what to whom in the melees. Whatever it is, it sounds painful.

The whole movie is loud, gritty, and relentless. Bourne is forever swiftly walking (or limping, as the events of the plot take their toll) from one lethal dragnet to another, always scheming to turn the tables on his pursuers. He realizes that he is the only person who really has a chance of understanding what’s going on, but that the answers are in those fragments of memory that resist teasing out.

Everyone in the movie is frayed, irritated, on edge. Landy has ambitions for promotion, and knows that Bourne is the key to something big, even if she’s not sure what it is. Julia Stiles offers another extended cameo as Nicky, the young logistical coordinator from Treadstone, who finds herself out in the field against her will and in very genuine fear for her life.

It’s these moments, as scripted by Tony Gilroy (another veteran of the first movie) and performed by these high-quality actors, that show the filmmakers putting value in what other thrillers gloss over on their way to more explosions. These are desperate, flawed people doing the best they can in a bewildering scenario, and their humanity leaks out in ways that draw us deeper in. As Bourne even manages to, we find a kind of affection for them – except, of course, for that sleazy tycoon and his henchmen. Whatever’s coming to them, they deserve.

There’s a third book – The Bourne Ultimatum – in the series, and there’s no reason not to expect it will be adapted as well. Bourne is growing and changing with each chapter, Damon shows us in delicate ways. Will the day come that the chasing ends, his skills finally weaken and he runs out of stashes of money and fake passports? The audience likes him, and though we wonder if he would even know what to do with a “normal life”, we hope yes. But we also hope for our own sake it does not happen quietly.

When Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) describes FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) as “a good listener”; it is all but a declaration of love at first sight. Whitacre himself is not much of a listener, at least to others – his brain is racing full-time with shifting thoughts, trivial musings, and self-aggrandizement. He is speaking with Agent Shepard in order to become a corporate whistleblower, and will spend three years undercover at his own company, collecting evidence of a billion-dollar fraud. The Agent and his partner (Joel McHale) marvel at Whitacre’s ability to live two lives.

What they fail to understand it that this is not a torture to him, but a dream come true. The Informant! – based on the gripping book by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald – is about a man who stopped living just one life a long time ago. In the life most people see he is a dweebish but highly-capable biochemist rising through the corporate ranks of ADM, one of the world’s largest food-products manufacturers. They can do things with an ear of corn that would startle you. But Whitacre has other lives – more fantastical, grandiose ones – as an orphan who made good out of some Dickensian turns of fortune, or as a guy with a swell idea for a TV show; and now, thanks to Agent Shepard, he gets to be the chipper, downstate version of Tom Cruise in The Firm.

Eichenwald’s book about the real-life price-fixing case built on the foundation of Whitacre’s testimony and wire recordings is an addictive read, because just as the intrigue about the case settles into procedure, the secret intrigue around Whitacre begins to unfurl itself. It earns its page-turning power because of how unbelievable is each successive act and revelation, how it makes you realize how little you can really know someone.

What filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has done is to seize on that essential truth, and bring all his prodigious tools to work mining it. The Informant! is not a follower on the path of Michael Mann’s The Insider, which another filmmaker might have made, but rather is an awesome cinematic joke, a pie in the face of America’s self-deluding hero complex, resting on a performance by Matt Damon free from all physical or psychological vanity.

Whitacre has a large house in Decatur, Illinois, several expensive cars, and a humble and endlessly-loyal wife played by a quietly superb Melanie Lynskey. At the office he comes off as well-meaning if gauche, technically-versed but given to flashes of awkward temperament. When he reports to his superiors that one of their plants has fallen victim to industrial sabotage, and that an executive from a Japanese rival is asking for a healthy bribe to make their problems go away, it is taken seriously enough that they call in the Feds.

And it is in a moment of desperate conscience that Whitacre confesses to the Agent who comes to this house that he has been involved for years in a worldwide scheme to fix the price of lysine, an amino acid with uses everywhere along the food-making chain. Stealing five extra cents a day from every American at their breakfast table turns out to add up to a pretty nice sum after awhile. He volunteers to help record the secret, informal meetings held in drab hotel conference rooms around the globe.

As a procedural, The Informant is plenty entertaining just because it feels so minutely ordinary and real. So many thrillers and cop shows boil down to gadget porn – investigators working out of cavernous, moodily-lit spaces with more flat screen monitors than a sports bar, using sci-fi technology that has lots of colors and beeping noises. Whitacare has a briefcase with a tape recorder inside it – one that doesn’t work reliably, at that. This feels much more like what a government budget would buy. And one can never imagine a high-stakes surveillance in something like 24 getting threatened because someone moved a lamp in front of the video camera.

But this is just one layer of the story – the other is about Whitacre’s crowded inner life. And it’s on this level that the first half of the movie plays like an inscrutable aesthetic puzzle. Composer Marvin Hamlisch’s score won’t seem like a triumph initially – it is loud, insistent, and feels forty years behind the times with its alternately jaunty and ominous arrangements, its way of commenting directly on action rather than complementing it. The more you understand Whitacre, though, the more you realize that this is the soundtrack in his own brain, the more wickedly amazing it is. Soderbergh has both the imagination to conceive of his specific treatment of the story, and the technical mastery to execute it so smoothly you barely notice the second half of the movie until it starts clubbing you like a clown with a stuffed sock.

Psychologists describe narcissism as a black hole that sucks in those around the narcissist. In The Informant!, Soderbergh and Damon show us how Whitacre’s place as the point-man in this groundbreaking case fed all his brain’s worst impulses, and how everyone around him got hitched to a train that wasn’t going the direction they thought it was. It is a comedy of frustration, about a man who believes he is outsmarting everyone long after he has already scripted his own undoing. You can see the agony in Agent Shepard – Bakula plays it so earnestly, perfectly square – as he struggles to understand why Whitacre would do the things he’s doing. Whitacre can’t answer – if he did, we might stop listening.