variety.com
17.04.2023 / 23:03
49%
‘To Catch a Killer’ Review: Shailene Woodley Hunts a Mass Shooter on the Loose in Baltimore
Dennis Harvey Film Critic In 2014, Argentine writer-director Damian Szifron made a considerable splash with “Wild Tales.” The Oscar-nominated, Almodóvar-produced feature consisted of six escalatingly over-the-top stories that put a blackly comic slant on human behaviors at their worst, adding up to a flamboyantly enjoyable whole. It’s surprising that it’s taken him nearly a decade to deliver his next feature, and more surprising still that it turns out to be his English-language debut “To Catch a Killer.” This Baltimore-set thriller, with Shailene Woodley as a cop helping FBI agent Ben Mendelsohn track down a mass shooter, is the screen equivalent of a page-turner: a solid investigative procedural that breaks no new ground, but delivers sufficient suspense, character interest, and action in confident fashion. Nonetheless, it’s a curiously impersonal, straight-ahead genre piece for a writer-director who so assertively staked out his terrain as an auteur the last time around. Vertical Entertainment is opening it on 500+ U.S. screens this Friday.
