There are two kinds of film made from a two-character play. The first keeps the door shut: it accepts that the play’s whole asset is pressure, two people and a room with nowhere to go, and it spends its money on faces and light. The second opens the door, because cinema can, and sends the camera out into the country while the pressure leaks quietly through the gap. Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder, adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her own 2014 play Switzerland, is built on the border between the two, and the reviews out of Toronto, which disagree about nearly everything else, agree on exactly where it stands: strongest inside the chalet, weaker every time it leaves. ...

A documentary about a man who will not sit down is an archive film, whatever the poster calls it. Alex Gibney’s Musk runs 225 minutes with a ten-minute intermission, and its subject is present for every one of them without having granted a single interview; the team made, in Gibney’s words at Toronto, so many formal outreaches and received nothing back except remarks on the man’s own platform. So the film was built from what already existed: more than three years of research, archival interviews and a database of the subject’s own quotations, which the cut spends like small change throughout. I want to count the debts before the assets, because the assets are considerable and the debts are the kind this form always runs up. ...

I am going to talk about the hands, and let everything else in Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York follow from them, because that is how the film itself is built. Harry (John Turturro) lifts a wallet and a gym bag from a young man in the opening stretch using, by IGN’s account, only a penny, and IGN goes on to describe the method the film takes care to show us: wallets snatched as if the thief were invisible, overcoats cut with tactical pockets so that the path from removal to hiding place is the shortest possible. The Substack critic John Doc calls these passages process porn, with approval, and he is right to approve; a film that bothers to show you how a trade is actually done has already made a promise about how seriously it will take everything else. Système D as a way of life, filmed with respect. The question is whether the rest of the picture keeps the promise the hands make. ...

I will talk mostly about the dirt, because the two critics I trust on this film arrived at the same place from different doors, and the place is clean. Julio Quintana’s Angel and the Badman, a remake of the 1947 Western that John Wayne produced for himself and James Edward Grant wrote and directed, went wide through Angel Studios on October 9 and had taken about $3.6 million by the middle of the month, against notices that Wikipedia, with its usual tact, summarizes as negative. Roger Moore’s complaint is the one a working crew will recognize instantly: everything in the frame looks tidy, freshly laundered and pressed. The house is newly painted, the barn looks new, the plow Penny hitches still has, in his joke, the showroom price tag on it. Scott Renshaw does not mention the paint; he finds the story a slog and the lead unconvincing from the first scene. Both are describing the same failure, and it is a failure of texture before it is one of casting. ...

There are two kinds of access documentary. The first kind extracts: it wins its way into the room and leaves with the confession, the slip, the bombshell the trailer has promised, and its grammar is the ambush, the hard question, the camera held a beat too long on a face that has just lied. The second kind supplies. It gives the subject the room, the time and the silence, and then it films what the subject does with them. You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s 174-minute documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, belongs with unusual purity to the second kind, and the reviews, which are rapturous to a degree I distrust on principle, agree on this one point even where they disagree on everything else: nobody in this film is cornered. Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, by The Wolfman Cometh’s account, regularly volunteer information Fielder was not seeking. Enough rope, patiently supplied. ...

Every family that has ever made a film together has had the same argument at the same table, and Family Movie is the first one I know of to sell tickets to it. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick direct, with Dan Beers writing the concept they sparked to; their children Sosie and Travis Bacon act; and the conceit is a low-budget horror film about a family making a low-budget horror film, which is either the laziest idea in the world or the most honest, depending on whether you have ever had to cast your own cousin because the day rate was zero. It premiered at SXSW on a Friday the 13th, in the Narrative Spotlight, with Gersh selling and no distributor yet attached at the time Deadline wrote it up. Deadline loved it. AwardsWatch gave it a D+. I find both verdicts defensible and the gap between them more interesting than either, because the gap is exactly where micro-budget meta films live. ...

Jason Blum has a rule for cheap horror that every producer in this tier can recite with a drink in hand: you may have a big cast, many locations, or heavy practical effects, and you may choose two. Nicholas Pineda, making his first feature, Infirmary, could afford one. He chose the building. Everything else in this production, the form, the cast size, the story, even the title, is downstream of that single pick, and the result, a found-footage night shift in a psych ward shot entirely inside a real abandoned hospital in Los Angeles, premiered at FrightFest in the UK and is now streaming on Shudder. I have not read a cleaner demonstration of the one-rule constraint this year, so let me walk it in the order the decisions were actually made, because the order is the lesson. ...

What happens when a documentarian makes his first fiction feature about television? You get a film in which every charge the critics file reads, from another angle, like a description of the method. Lance Oppenheim is thirty, formed entirely in nonfiction, the HBO series Ren Faire behind him and an Elizabeth Holmes film co-directed with Nathan Fielder ahead, and Primetime, his first scripted picture, released by A24 from a screenplay by the equally first-time Ajon Singh, takes as its subject Chris Hansen and the Dateline NBC machine of To Catch a Predator. Robert Pattinson plays Hansen. The reviews are split down a line so clean you could light it: everyone admires the surface, and everyone files the same complaint about what is under it. ...

Let me count this one’s debts before its assets, because with Paul Greengrass the two are always drawn from the same account. The debts, filed almost identically by every notice I have read: the middle of The Uprising goes muddled once factions and locations start arriving at speed; several characters function as representations of a class rather than people; and the screenplay keeps reaching past the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt toward folklore, a mythology layer the marketing itself connects to the Robin Hood legend, which sits badly beside the grounded drama around it. Seat42F’s reviewer puts the complaint in one clean sentence, that the film doesn’t need the additional mythology, and Brian Orndorf is blunter still, finding the director dramatically constipated, the pace throttled. The audience wing of the prosecution is on the record too; one r/movies thread opens, with the weariness of a man who paid for his ticket, just watched The Uprising, and honestly, what a slog. ...