McQueen's best

It's how one interprets these things . . .

Oh yes, and it was a photoshoot for Faye Dunaway even more so. I actually found it distracting that she appeared in every single scene, even the short ones, with a different hairdo and outfit (distracting, because it raised a narrative AND a meta-narrative concern: narrative - when on earth does this woman have time to do anything other than preparing for going out? meta-narrative - is this secretly supposed to be a Faye Dunaway homage slide-show?). And I usually like Faye a lot.

In fact I expected to like the whole movie lot, and to have my stomach seriously butterflied by Steve-Faye hot moments, but none of this happened. I haven't even felt much during the chess scene, where the gestures and looks felt syncopated, unnatural, about as immersive as reading the phrase "She is seducing him and he becomes irresistibly attracted to her". And I had this feeling about several other moments in the movie, such as the outcome of the heist ("He is too smart and the police can't catch him"), Faye solving the crime ("She is very clever and intuitive and figures out the criminal"), and Steve in his free time ("He is a hedonist and an adrenalin junkie"). The corresponding scenes might have been just as well replaced by intertitles. In addition, the sound recording was really odd, the only sounds we could hear were just those we had to hear - the voices, the music, gun shots and screams (for the heist scene), glasses tinkling (for a dinner scene), waves against the shore (for the scene on the shore) and that was it, any other background noise was completely silenced. Did they record the sound after filming the movie? Oh and we could also hear McQueen throwing several rounds of mad man laughter, which was just as mystifying as the straight face / GRIN! / straight face thing he did several times here.

Nope, not one of Steve's best, and I agree with you about the other choices as good McQueen movies.

As to the OP and first answerer - is there any reason why you don't want to share with the rest of us the secret meanings of McQueen's character in this movie?

there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder