True Story (2015)

The film is exceptionally well-made... There is nothing warm about the style, yet it allows for moments of simmering tension, broken by a few emotional explosions that shatter its well-composed surface.

The reporter/convict dynamic doesn’t have enough layers to carry the film without some hint of mystery. The relationship between the two, chilling as it is, never raises this “Story” from generic to profound.

While never as gripping as a good piece of fiction, Goold’s treatment actually manages to improve on the book, even if that meant fabricating a few things along the way.

If the film's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership.

No one in the film is particularly likeable, and while the global implications about epistemology are interesting, the specifics of this particular case, at least rendered here, are quite dull.