Recensioni de* critic*

Filming the process of creation — corrupt and otherwise — requires some sense of imagination and curiosity. I'm afraid that shots of Hill trudging in the snow or Franco sitting in dark profile don't cut it.

With the pent-up carnality of his coruscating verbal intelligence, Hill suggests troubled realms that Goold's heavy-handed, literal direction can't reach—and there's hardly an effort to make sense of Longo. Filming a drama about the compromises and conventions of storytelling, Goold falls prey to them. He lacks the pulp verve and the symbolic imagination to illuminate or even convey the characters' mysteries.

Murder mystery, journalism exposé, courtroom drama, metaphysical inquiry into the secret-sharer nature of certain American Bros, proof that James Franco and Jonah Hill can serious-act opposite one another—it seems to be going for any one of these at any given moment, and in the end winds up being not a whole lot more than ostentatiously unpleasant and ugly.

Especially for a movie that springs from a horrific and grisly crime, True Story feels undershaped and indistinct; it's too dispassionate to be genuinely chilly. The flashback moments, in which we're given a sense of how Longo's crimes were actually committed, are hazy and muted, and while you want to give Goold credit for not sensationalizing them, they feel blanched and bloodless and somehow detached from the rest of the movie.

If True Story's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership... The script tangles admirably with the idea that any "true story" is largely dependent on the perspective of the storyteller, but the cookie-cutter grimness of Goold's visual methods only sells the film as yet another passable slice of American true crime.

There's much to savor in this feature debut by British stage director Rupert Goold, who makes a well-buffed addition to a nascent two-hander subgenre: the treacherous journalistic interview... Bringing shock, awe, and embellishment to these events, True Story supplies something more like a war game.

True Story" contains some of the best work — maybe the best — that the ubiquitous James Franco has done yet in a movie, on par with his wannabe Rastafarian drug dealer from Harmony Korine's "Spring Breakers" ...As the convicted murderer Christian Longo, Franco was deeply committed and scarily good — an ingenious sociopath who lacks human empathy but understands a great deal about how to milk it from others.