Matt Cipolla

While expanding some of its snapshots could’ve helped, the approach works well enough, welcoming a director to watch in the process.

It’s not that Longlegs doesn’t make sense of its parts, or that it lacks, as Harker alludes, even a singular revelation. It’s that it seems to think the most basic twist possible counts. Even with its jagged accents, the pieces are just too clean.

It’s not so much a matter of the piece being one-sided; that would at least imply a more vehement perspective. It’s the lack of deconstructive efforts here that ultimately turn the piece into less than the sum of its parts.

The idea of making a documentary about the man isn’t inherently flawed, but this one’s approach is, lacking the insight or visuals to make it feel like more than a glorified clip show.

As a whodunnit it largely works, save one aspect easy to spot miles away. Stakes-wise it’s high, even if it pulls its punches once or twice on who bites the bullet. As a return to form for Scream, this is a sigh of relief––notwithstanding some key issues VI has a freewheeling sense of lunacy, and it’s way too fun to decry.

Feste’s script does nothing to establish its world. While first appearing to be tethered to reality, Run Sweetheart Run soon recontextualizes itself as supernatural without telegraphing or even justifying its decisions.

It wants to be something cute for the family. It also wants to show how belligerent and vulgar young teenagers can be. The problem is that the two never intersect, and it’s jarring, to say the least.

This one sure is a challenge. Lots of that has to do with how the movie’s successes only become apparent after the fact. Its structure is its story, and it folds in on itself as much as it stacks its pieces on top of one another

Scream is not a bad movie. It is, however, a case of mediocrity being the worst sin. For a franchise all about coping with a media landscape that begets disillusionment to produce something just like this, it especially hurts.

Despite the reasons House of Gucci doesn’t work, none are damning enough to make a bad movie. It’s forgettable, sometimes playing like the sort of cable-TV fare that displaced these tales from the silver screen over the past decade. Yet Scott’s efforts, and especially those of Johnson and Bentivegna, just don’t keep up. And what’s the point of going big if you’re not going to go for it all?