Spend any time on the hellspace that is Film Twitter, and you’ll soon see someone mourning the “death of the American movie star.” Maybe it’ll be a user with 19 followers, maybe it’ll be a critic who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, but you’ll eventually see it. Maybe you’ll read something about how four out of Sydney Sweeney‘s five 2025 movies flopped (the other, it must be noted, quickly got greenlit for a sequel) or maybe a Reddit user with the name Fun-Pickle-9821 will post in r/self and complain about how boring he thinks Timothée Chalamet is on screen.
Despite the fact that I find this a particularly uninteresting way to talk about art, I couldn’t help but think about these eulogies during my latest rewatch of 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. This is a movie that celebrates the movie star, despite not being about movies or stars.
Director Steven Soderbergh had a 2000 that most filmmakers would do terrible things for, putting out both Traffic and Erin Brockovich, receiving Academy Award nominations for both, and somehow not splitting the vote to earn the little golden guy for Traffic. You would imagine this would be the apex of his career, but he followed it up with Ocean’s Eleven, an even more star-studded affair that inarguably has remained more at the front of our pop culture memory, resulting in multiple sequels and a spin-off.
Based on the 1960 movie of the same name (starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., colloquially known as the Rat Pack — the coolest guys on the planet if you smoked cigarettes and wore turtlenecks under your sport coat), Ocean’s Eleven stars George Clooney as Danny Ocean, a recent prison parolee already ready for his next job. He teams up with his old partner, Rusty (Brad Pitt, just kiss already), and the two gather a specialist team of “a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros, and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever,” which includes Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Elliott Gould, and Bernie Mac, among others. The plan to rob three Vegas casinos in one night is just the beginning — Ocean wants to win back his ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts), and take down her new lover, casino-owner Terry (Andy Garcia).
This is a heist film with fantastic heist machinations, and it doesn’t need any of that plotting. The movie’s genius is that it could work on its own, without any of those actors (and that’s exactly what Soderbergh did in 2017, with the much-less glamorous and character actor-heavy Logan Lucky, starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, and Riley Keough), but it also works as a Vegas hangout movie. You just get to hang out with Clooney, Pitt, Roberts, and that unbelievable ensemble.
It is a movie heightened by the chemistry and charisma of its cast. While plenty of films create character through motivation and struggle, Ocean’s Eleven relies on your background knowledge (and probable love) of the film’s starry cast. In fact, it weaponizes your adoration of these people by casting (most of them) as criminals, rogues, and ne’er-do-wells. If Clooney ne’er does well, you still can’t hate him. It’s George Clooney! With a chin like that, there’s no question that he’s on the right side of things, whether or not he actually is.
It’s interesting that Clooney, in particular, embodies that movie star aura, as he was only a year removed from his Emmy-winning run on ER (1994-2009). Before the days of cable prestige TV, there was still a distinction between TV stars and movie stars. Before ER, he was a supporting actor on sitcoms. As the medical drama raised his profile, he was promoted to the big leagues by being cast in the titular role in one of the worst Batman movies, and opened a few (forgettable) box office successes. In the late ‘90s headed into 2000, he really found his acting range in character roles for auteurs like the Coen Brothers (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), Robert Rodriguez (From Dusk Till Dawn), and Soderbergh (Out of Sight). Soderbergh, in both films, found the best of Clooney — conventionally cool, calm, and collected, but capable of going quirky and complicated.
It has long been said that Brad Pitt is a character actor in a leading man’s body, and the Ocean trilogy shows just how true that is. He doesn’t even do that much; he just eats shrimp cocktail and rolls his sleeves up enough so you can see his mysterious tattoo. While he gives those“Oh shit, he’s actually a great actor” performances in Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Moneyball (2011), Ocean’s Eleven shows just how comfortable he is being a number two — something he would do again in deep ensemble movies like and Burn After Reading (2008) and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). In fact, his willingness to play second fiddle adds to his character’s elusiveness. There’s an alternate timeline version of this movie where Pitt plays the Clooney part, and Matt Damon gets promoted to the Pitt part, and that movie’s also really good! But we live in a world where Ocean’s Eleven has Brad Pitt to spare, and that makes it a good enough world to live in.
Rounding out the main trio is Julia Roberts, and, after dominating the entire decade that was the ’90s, she needs no introduction, but the movie gives her one where she enters the frame in a gorgeous gown and the same look she gives on Vogue and Vanity Fair covers. The film’s bench is so deep, in fact, that she gets the elusive “and” credit. And that ensemble is seemingly never-ending, with Garcia as Clooney’s Roberts-stealing nemesis and Matt Damon as theleast important white guy in the whole film.
This movie seriously has everyone, with some Don Cheadle and Scott Caan thrown in for good measure.
One of the main reasons that Ocean’s Eleven still stands tall as a movie star masterpiece is that Clooney, Pitt, and Roberts are still some of Hollywood’s most notorious leading actors. When you think about the “death of the movie star,” what you’re thinking about is the roster of actors able to sell a movie, to get butts in seats at the cinema, with their name and face alone. Few can still do that. Hell, Clooney and Roberts got Ticket to Paradise (2022), a mid-level film with low critical acclaim, to $170 millionin this decade.
After Pitt opened F1 in 2025, a movie about how he’s way too old to be a Formula One driver (because he’s way too old to be a Formula One Driver) to over $600 million, writer Alex Lei explained this improbability in his piece “Poor Formula,” saying, “People still remember their faces from when stars had power, when the culture industry could still confidently produce them, and so people will go to look at their strangely un-aging faces in unoccupied movie halls and at night while half-looking at their iPads.”
They are from an era where movie stars were elusive. They were the people from movies and TV, as well as “newspaper features, magazine covers, morning shows, (and) late-night hits,” as explained by culture critic Nicholas Quah in Variety. Now, Timothée Chalamet shows up to his own look-alike contest, Sydney Sweeney’s mom throws a MAGA birthday party, and actors feel more like us than they ever did before. We know what Finn Wolfhard‘s last meal would be. We’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence and Glen Powell yap about their favorite ’90s comedies with Bill Simmons. We’ve seen Sabrina Carpenter go day drinking with Seth Meyers. Celebrities, they’re just like us! They even sweat when they eat spicy food! (In that same Variety piece, one publicist told Quah, “Don’t fucking talk to me about Hot Ones,” which is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in print.)
That’s why we think the movie star is a dying breed. Modern stars can serve that same function for the business; Chalamet can get a movie about ping pong to $120 million, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande can make a Broadway musical an international phenomenon, but it just doesn’t feel the same. When Nikki Glaser jokes at the Golden Globes about not knowing anything about Leonardo DiCaprio (thanks to her detective work, we at least know that his favorite food in 1991 was “pasta, pasta, and more pasta”), it’s not really a joke! He exists only as a guy who opens big movies and dates hot 20-somethings, and that’s it. What do we do afterthese stars retire?
As a result, Ocean’s Eleven feels like a relic of a bygone time. It’s a comfort film, one that brings back nostalgic memories. It’s about George Clooney’s effortless charm. It’s about Brad Pitt’s hunky confidence. It’s about how amazing Julia Roberts looks in the right dress. I’m not sure that movies need anything else, and I’m not sure if we’ll get many more movies like it.
Retrospective Courtesy of Patrick J. Regal (Find him on Letterboxd here.)
Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros