For everything that can be said about director Michael Winterbottom — prolific, relentlessly experimental, even messy — an undercurrent of classical narrative structure has animated much of his oeuvre. Perhaps it’s because of the sheer volume of his output: 32 feature films across three decades, not including his television movies and miniseries.
Indeed, for this reason, Michael Winterbottom has been compared (often disparagingly) to Steven Soderbergh. When watching a Soderbergh film, whether it be 2008’s political drama Che or 2018’s psychological drama Unsane, one can see that he’s behind the camera. His twin releases in 2025, Presence and Black Bag, may feel disparate in genre and approach. Still, they are nevertheless in line with Soderbergh’s intense focus on process and his aesthetic emphasis on soft lighting and deep color palettes.
Whereas Steven Soderbergh has almost perfected a glossy procedural sheen to his work, Michael Winterbottom has remained frustratingly more elusive. He has his preoccupations, but also seems to reject the kind of auteurist reading given to the upper echelon of filmmakers. How can the same person have directed the frantic 2002 comedy 24 Hour Party People and the lethargic 2010 psychological drama The Killer Inside Me, for example?
Outside of a long collaboration with Steve Coogan, an interest in Thomas Hardy (The Claim, Jude, and Trishna) and alternative rock (9 Songs and On the Road), as well as a willingness to move across mediums and genres, there’s little that unifies Winterbottom’s work. This, perhaps, helps explain the muted response following his latest, the historical romance Shoshana.
Filmed in 2021, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, and arriving stateside two years later to a collective shrug, Shoshana is a fascinating window into the hazards of hyper-productivity and anonymity at a time when brands such as A24 and Neon have cultivated an almost fetishistic loyalty to not only auteurism but also a classification of singular-branding for filmmakers.
Unlike Ari Aster or Robert Eggers, Winterbottom (and Soderbergh) don’t inspire the same rabid fan bases. However, we can see how this boxing-in also twists back on itself. Aster’s films have seen diminishing financial, if not creative, returns since he eschewed “elevated horror” to make Beau Is Afraid and, more recently, Eddington. Eggers had a massive creative and financial hit with 2024’s Nosferatu, but only a relatively tepid response to The Northman, from 2022, and another genre pivot.
That’s not to say that Shoshana is on the same level as any of the above films, but more to highlight that it’s not the all-out disaster that a two-year gap between festival premiere and release would suggest. In fact, Shoshana is probably the strongest film that Winterbottom has made since 2011’s Trishna (discounting The Trip series/films, of course). A romantic tragedy set against the backdrop of Mandatory Palestine, it’s the sort of film that leads one to an inevitable cliché: they don’t make them like this anymore.
Shoshana is also a knotty film about the dangers of radical ideology and the lingering trauma of British imperialism on Palestine and Israel. It doesn’t exactly speak to our present moment, having premiered a month before the Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023 — and it problematically erases Arabs from its narrative while narrowing in on British and Zionist relations — but nevertheless implies parallels between current discourse about the Israeli and Palestinian relationship and the radicalization of its titular character, Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum).
More than anything, Shoshana is a love story between Shoshana and Thomas Wilkin (Douglass Booth), a British-born investigator for the Palestine Police who is sympathetic to the Jewish people; a stance that troubles his fiercely nationalistic boss, Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling). These are the stories of real people, by the way. While Winterbottom has fictionalized and condensed a lot within his film, he nevertheless gets at the vague contours of tension between Zionist causes and British rule, succinctly differentiating the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi, as well as dramatizing the murder of the radical Lehi leader Avraham Stern by Morton.
Winterbottom moves through many contexts, using historical footage and voice-overs. Despite that, Shoshana is a melodrama that hasn’t been seen in recent years. It’s more akin to
Anthony Minghella’s period drama The English Patient, from 1996, than any other film. That might be viewed as a cop-out by Winterbottom (and co-writers Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh). Staging a conventional romantic tragedy with fictionalized versions of real people within a bloody, confusing conflict that has spilled into the present might seem disingenuous, a criticism I understand but don’t necessarily agree with.
Instead, while watching Shoshana, I was struck by how conventionally good it was. That might seem like a backhanded compliment, but I assure you it isn’t. Instead, I fear that Winterbottom’s output has become too defined by its restlessness. It’s as if each of his films cannot be taken on its own terms but, instead, must be juxtaposed against each other to create a unified theory of auteurism through variety. Like Soderbergh, Winterbottom has become so good at shapeshifting that each film adds a new chapter to the ever-growing inability to define thematic, narrative, or even filmic preoccupations without necessarily existing as an entity in its own right.
Shoshana is a good film, though it’s not “great”. Titling the story is something of a misdirect, considering how much of it is actually about Tom and his attempts to straddle the line between loving a Jewish woman and enforcing colonial rule. Further, while Booth is adequate in his role, he nevertheless doesn’t convey the moral uncertainty that his character needs.
This isn’t helped by the fact that Shoshana and Geoffrey are essentially portrayed as opposing ends of ideological spectrums, pulling his character apart. Starshenbaum and Melling perform better here, but they are also more dogma personified than fully fleshed-out people.
Shoshana also led me to wonder where Winterbottom fits within the modern film economy. His next work apparently is another turn back into historical fiction: an adaptation of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. For a filmmaker whose work has always been creatively and commercially risky (9 Songs, of course, but even his meta-adaptation Tristan Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story), Shoshana is perhaps the most traditional film he’s ever made, but also one I expect won’t find its financial or critical footing anytime soon. It’s solid but also a little unremarkable.
However, if Shoshana (or Presence or Black Bag) cannot gain enough critical esteem and word-of-mouth, what should happen to the prolific auteurs? The reliable ones like Winterbottom or Soderbergh or even Luca Guadagnino, whose second film last year, Queer, was almost entirely eclipsed by his first, Challengers. These filmmakers essentially transform with each film, and while they don’t necessarily create a masterpiece every time, they at least can be counted on to make something interesting.
Is Shoshana interesting enough in a market that favors name recognition, branding, and big swings over volume? Of course, it’s hard to “eventize” a film or filmmaker when they are releasing multiple films a year. Michael Winterbottom’s inability to be categorized means he’s not a brand in and of himself but more a marker of quality control. Shoshana quietly finishes out its limited run before, hopefully, finding a second life on streaming. Nevertheless, it’s a film worth seeking out