Blue Caprice

Perhaps the quietest, saddest, most delicate movie ever made about a pair of unrepentant serial killers. Washington and Richmond deliver two towering, award-caliber performances, and Moors's artful, restrained direction focuses more on mood than action, eschewing any sort of straightforward storyline. This is ostensibly the tale of a highly unconventional, oddly loving father/son relationship--it's just that the father and son are psychos. Don't miss this.

There are a few films of this type now. The filmmakers must have known the work will be scrutinised to see if they: (a) reduce explanation to exculpatory social factors; (b) conversely treat the crime as inexplicable and hence wallow in vague, obscure artiness; (c) apportion responsibility to the father figure and hence let the younger culprit off the hook; (d) exploit the crime for profit. Their answers are a reasonable balance between these choices, but the film offers nothing terribly new.

A disquietingly intense and deeply disturbing reflection on the senselessness and banality of evil. How these true-to-life characters reached such a messed-up place is merely hinted at and is not adequately explored. Perhaps this is the film's major flaw but I also get the feeling the ambiguity was deliberate. The fact that we can't quite fully grasp their murderous intentions only adds to its menacing quality.

waste movie

A fascinating study on how the loss of a strong foundation & the failures of systems can lead a young person down the wrong path. You can't help but watch and wonder what would happen to the character if he'd had a proper support system. Scary & chilling, the film is a remarkably made cautionary tale on how unconditional love can become scary conditional love. Kudos to Isaiah Washington, who provides a great mix of menace, gut instinct, and depression in his villain protagonist performance.

A kid trying to be an American slowly becomes the product of a nation in constant state of fear. Part docudrama, part coming of age story which links domestic cruelty to the invisible violence this very nation builds inside and outside its borders -- kids need to be in the army to have a life, guns are easy to get, people are killed randomly in the heart of the country, men that get back from the war walk among us with bad ideas in their heads. Is there a reason to kill? Not. Kid wants his dad.

Not bad.

Those poor, poor psychopaths - They were only trying to...wait, what was the point again?

Working very much in the same, now familiar vein of Van Sant's Elephant or Justin Kurzel's Snowtown, this takes a headline-grabbing tragedy and renders it in tone that is both obtuse, atmospheric and self-consciously underplayed as to avoid coming across as crass or exploitative. For what it is, it's handled reasonably well here, but ultimately it can't entirely avoid lapsing into a certain amount of sensationalism eventually, even if it's never quite as explicit as Kurzel's film.

A bland father-son drama imagined as the backdrop to the 2002 D.C. sniper shootings. Very little in the way of subtext.