Blue Caprice

Directed by Alexandre Moors

(R)

***

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“Some viewers may find this quiet, methodical film slow-moving,” said Kyle Smith in theNew York Post. But by taking “a minimalist, documentary-style approach” to creating a fictionalized portrait of the two men responsible for 2002’s Beltway sniper attacks, director Alexandre Moors“properly lets the banality of evil speak for itself,” making the pair’s crimes “all the more shocking.” Isaiah Washington plays drifter John Muhammad “with simmering lunacy,” but makes him charismatic enough that we understand why the much younger Lee Boyd Malvo found his inchoate rage attractive, said John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal. As Malvo, Tequan Richmond is a bit of a cipher—until Muhammad devises a way to convert their shared fury into a terror mission. But the shootings themselves have been relegated to “a hasty montage at the end,” and the character study of Muhammad and Malvo “always seems just on the edge of revealing some truth about their toxic bond that it never quite delivers,” said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. “For all of its tasteful spareness, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial.”