Metacritic reviews

The Laundromat is an air-tight, tumultuous info-graph about our rotten to the core financial systems and, in particular, the 2016 Mossack and Fonseca leak, when millions of the Panamanian law firm’s files were anonymously leaked to the press.

The film’s prize asset ... is Meryl Streep.

The Laundromat is Soderbergh at his most playful, and also Soderbergh at his most wonkish, and damned, in this case, if the two don’t chime together.

Much of the movie is bitterly funny; some of it just amusingly droll. But the finale, a rallying cry that’s both galvanizing and wistful, is a wrap-up worth waiting for.

The Laundromat may be blunt, and the humor hit-or-miss — but it swings wildly at a worthy target, and eventually hits its mark.

Comparisons to Adam McKay‘s “The Big Short” and “Vice” are unavoidable. But though The Laundromat is similarly breezy, unsubtle, and disposable—it is not, we’d wager, one of the Soderbergh films that will best stand the test of time—it is still a better movie.

Despite the filmmaker's obvious smarts and oft-proven skills, there's a kind of off-putting effrontery about Soderbergh's approach here that rather sours the whole experience. The tone is brittle, the attitude arch, the performances by a savvy and diverse cast uneven.

The movie goes all over the place, attempting to map the world of this thing but really just chasing its idea into abstraction. Which is the opposite direction of where it should be going.

Obvious good intentions are drowned in a hot wash of showboating stars and flooded by self-indulgence.

The Laundromat flails about, with an excess of bad ideas that undercut the justifiable outrage over the events depicted.