Roger Ebert, one of America's most influential film critics, gave a scathing one-and-a-half-star review to Steven Soderbergh's 2002 film "Full Frontal", calling it "truly inexplicable" and "so amateurish". The film arrived hot on the heels of Soderbergh's commercially successful "Ocean's Eleven" (2001), making its poor critical reception all the more notable given the director's proven talent and pedigree, including acclaimed films such as "Traffic" and "Out of Sight".

Ebert's chief complaint centred on the film's visual style, as it was shot entirely on a Canon XL-1 camcorder, an unusual and novel choice for a feature film at the time. He likened the cinematography to a "film school student" wielding their "first digital camera", and argued the few 35mm sequences (depicting a film within the film) only highlighted how inferior the digital footage looked by comparison. Notably, Ebert had praised the similarly camcorder-shot "The Blair Witch Project" three years earlier, suggesting his issue was as much with execution as with format, and he closed his review with a memorably cutting line comparing the film to a character's on-screen demise during a masturbation scene.